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Charles Laughton (1 July, 1899 – 15 December, 1962) was an English stage and film actor. He became an American citizen in 1950. While best known for his historical roles in films, he started his career as a remarkable stage actor. In a moment when stage actors despised movies as a legitimate medium, only being interested in them as a source of income, Laughton showed keen and serious interest in the pioneering possibilities of film, and later other media, such as radio, recordings, and TV, proving that it was worth that quality work could be available to larger audiences other than theatre goers.

Early life and career

Laughton was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire. His mother was a devout Catholic and he attended the famed Jesuit school, Stonyhurst College, in Lancashire, England.[1] He served during World War I [2] (in which he was gassed).

At first he went into the family business (hotels), while participating in amateur theatricals in Scarborough. Finally allowed by his family to become a drama student at RADA in 1925, he would make his first professional stage appearance in 1926. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences with his talent and played many classical roles before making his film debut in 1932. His best-remembered film role of that year was as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, although in this year he turned out a number of memorable performances like Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls, and the little clerk in the segment of If I Had a Million directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

His association with film director Alexander Korda began with The Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on the life of King Henry VIII of England), for which Laughton won an Academy Award. However, he continued to act in the theatre, and his American production of Galileo by (and with) Bertolt Brecht is legendary.

Later career

Later films included The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Les Misérables (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) (as Captain Bligh, one of his most famous screen roles, co-starring with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Rembrandt (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). In 1937, he was to have starred in an ill-fated film version of the classic novel, I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, which was abandoned only part-way into filming due to the injuries suffered by co-star Merle Oberon in a car crash.

After I, Claudius, he and the legendary German film producer Erich Pommer teamed up founding the company Mayflower Pictures in the UK, which produced three films starring Laughton: Vessel of Wrath, based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, St. Martin's Lane, a story about London street entertainers, and Jamaica Inn, based in a novel by Daphne du Maurier, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. (Note: Hitchcock returned to London to film Frenzy in the early 1970s.) The films produced were not successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the role of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Laughton and Pommer had plans to make further films, but the outbreak of World War II, which implied the loss of many foreign markets, meant the end of the company.

Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role as Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the screen version of Agatha Christie's play Witness for the Prosecution (1957). He was the first actor to portray Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot when he starred in Alibi - a stage adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - in 1928.

He worked for the first and only time with his chief acting rival, Laurence Olivier, in Spartacus (1960).

His final film was Advise and Consent (1962), for which he received favorable comments for his performance as a southern U.S. Senator (for which accent he studied recordings of the late Mississippi Senator John Stennis). Laughton worked on the film, which was directed by Otto Preminger, while he was dying from bone cancer.

Laughton took a stab at directing a movie, and the result was the legendary The Night of the Hunter (1955), starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. This movie is often cited among today's critics as one of the best movies of the 1950s; unfortunately it was a critical and box-office flop when it was originally released. Laughton never had another chance to direct his own movies. He did not appear in the film, but worked solely as a director.

In addition to The Night of the Hunter, Laughton directed several plays on Broadway. His most notable box-office success as a director came in 1954, with The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a full-length stage dramatization by Herman Wouk of the court-martial scene in Wouk's novel The Caine Mutiny. The play opened the same year as the Humphrey Bogart film based on the original novel, but did not affect that film's box-office performance. Laughton also directed a staged reading in 1953 of Steven Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body, a full-length poem about the American Civil War and its aftermath. The production starred Tyrone Power, Raymond Massey (re-creating his film characterizations of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown (abolitionist)), and Judith Anderson. Laughton did not appear himself in either of these productions, but John Brown's Body was recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks.

He made several spoken word recordings during his lifetime. One of his most famous was his one-man album of Charles Dickens's Mr. Pickwick's Christmas, a twenty-minute version of the Christmas chapter from Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. It was first released by Decca in 1944 as a 4-record 78-RPM set, but was afterwards transferred to LP. It frequently appeared on LP with a companion piece, Decca's 1941 adaptation of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, starring Ronald Colman as Scrooge. Both stories were released together on a Deutsche Grammophon CD in time for Christmas 2005. In 1939, Laughton recorded a reading of the Nativity story from St. Luke's Gospel, and this was released in 1995 on CD on a Nimbus Records collection entitled Prima Voce: The Spirit of Christmas Past.

In an unusual move regarding a suspense thriller, Laughton was also heard narrating the story on the soundtrack album of the film that he directed, Night of the Hunter, accompanied by the film's score. This album has also been released on CD.

However, none of Laughton's other record albums have been made available on CD as yet. There are two especially notable ones still waiting. The first is a complete, 2-LP, Columbia Masterworks recording of the 1950 Broadway staging of George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell scene from his play Man and Superman, in which Laughton both played the Devil and directed. He co-starred in this production with Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead.

The other notable recording unavailable on CD is a 2-LP Capitol Records album that was released in 1962, the year of Laughton's death, entitled The Story Teller. Taken from the one-man stage shows that Laughton loved to appear in, it culls together dramatic readings from several sources. Three of the excerpts are broadcast annually on a Minnesota Public Radio Thanksgiving program entitled Giving Thanks. The Story Teller won a Grammy in 1962 for Best Spoken Word Recording.

Private life

He had a long and resilient marriage to actress Elsa Lanchester, although, in her autobiography, Lanchester claimed that Laughton was homosexual. According to her own account, she was shocked to learn about this, but eventually decided to remain married to him; however she claims as a result of this, she decided not to have children with him. The decision caused him great grief, as he longed to become a father, as many friends of Laughton, among them Maureen O'Hara and Stanley Cortez, have stated.

Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957) for which both received Academy Award nominations. Laughton for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress. Neither won.

In 1950, the couple became American citizens.

Laughton is interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

Trivia

• Charles Laughton is caricatured as the prefect (and the villain) in the comic Asterix and the Golden Sickle. (Source: The complete guide to Asterix by Peter Kessler ISBN 0-340-65346-9)

Some bibliography

• Charles Laughton. A Difficult Actor by Simon Callow. Biography and analysis of his film and stage work.

• Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of the Night of the Hunter by Preston Neal Jones. Book covering the genesis, making and aftermath of the film, with many interviews with people involved in its making, which offer insights and bring down some false myths.

• Tell Me a Story (1957) and The Fabulous country (1962). Two literary anthologies selected by Charles Laughton. They contain pieces which were presented by him in his reading tours across America, with written introductions which give some insight about Laughton's thoughts. This selection presents texts from the Bible, Charles Dickens, Thomas Wolfe, Ray Bradbury and James Thurber to name just a few.

• Bertolt Brecht in America (1983) by James K. Lyon. An extensively researched account of the German playwright's sojourn in the USA after fleeing Nazi Germany. The collaboration, preparatory work and 1947 stagings of "Galileo" with Charles Laughton are covered in this thoroughly researched book.

• Charles Laughton and I (1938) and Elsa Lanchester Herself (1983) by Elsa Lanchester. In her very personal memoirs Elsa offers a somewhat unbalanced portrait of her late husband.

External links

• Rooting for Laughton: Laughtonians of the world, Unite!
• Charles laughton & Elsa Lanchester Message Board at Yahoo: an online meeting place for fans or Charles and/or Elsa

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