Charles Laughton

Charles Laughton
photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1940.
Born	Charles Laughton

Charles Laughton (1 July, 1899–15 December, 1962) was an Academy Award-winning English stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and one-time director. 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. During a time when many serious stage actors despised the motion picture medium, seeing it only 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 quality work could be made available to audiences other than theatre-goers.

Early life and career

Laughton was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, the son of Robert Laughton by his wife Elizabeth (née Conlon). His mother was a devout Catholic and he attended the famed Jesuit school, Stonyhurst College, in Lancashire, England. He served during World War I (in which he was gassed) with the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Regiment and later with the Northamptonshire Regiment.

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 made his first professional stage appearance on April 28, 1926 at the Barnes Theatre, as Osip in the comedy The Government Inspector, in which he also appeared at the London Gaiety Theatre in May. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences with his talent and played many classical roles. His debut in the USA took place on September 24, 1931, at the Lyceum Theatre (New York), as William Marble in Payment Deferred. He returned to London and was engaged in numerous Shakespeare roles. In 1936 he went to Paris and on May 9 appeared at the Comedie Francaise as Sganarelle in the second act of Moliere's Le Medecin malgré lui, the first English actor to appear at that theatre, where he acted the part in French and received an ovation. He continued his stage career intermittently until the end of his life.

Laughton commenced his film career in England. He took small roles in two short silent comedies starring his wife Elsa Lanchester, Daydreams and Blue Bottles (both 1928) and he made a brief appearance as a disgruntled diner in another silent film Piccadilly with Anna May Wong in 1929. He appeared with Elsa Lanchester again in a "film revue," featuring assorted British variety acts, called Comets (1930) and made two other early British talkies: Wolves with Dorothy Gish (1930) from a play set in a whaling camp in the frozen north, and Down River (1931) in which he played a murderous, half-oriental drug-smuggler.

His first Hollywood film was The Old Dark House (1932) with Boris Karloff but his best-remembered film role of that year was as Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross. That same year, he turned out a number of memorable performances, such as H. G. Wells's mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls, and the little clerk in the segment of If I Had a Million directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Hollywood, he also repeated his stage role as a murderer in Payment Deferred and played a demented submarine commander in The Devil and the Deep with Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.

His association with film director Alexander Korda began in 1933 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 occasionally in the theatre, and his American production of Galileo by (and with) Bertolt Brecht is legendary.

Later career

from the trailer for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Later films included White Woman (1933) in which he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a cockney river trader in the Malaysian jungle; The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) as Norma Shearer's malevolent father; Les Misérables (1935) as Javert, the police inspector; 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) as the very English butler transported to early 1900s America; and the title roles in 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 (1938) , based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, St. Martin's Lane, a story about London street entertainers, and Jamaica Inn, based on 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's film roles in the 1930s consisted almost entirely of the costume and historical drama parts for which he is best remembered (ie: Nero, Henry VIII, Mr. Barrett, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, etc). In his modern-dress film roles in his 1940s movies his over-the-top acting style often led to variable results. He played an Italian vineyard owner in California in They Knew What They Wanted (1940); a South Seas patriarch in The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942); an impoverished pianist in Tales of Manhattan (1942); an American admiral in Stand by for Action (1942); a butler in Forever and a Day (1943); a cowardly school-master in occupied France in This Land is Mine (1943); an Australian bar-owner in The Man from Down Under (1943); the title role in an up-dated version of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost (1944); and a wife-murderer in The Suspect (1944).

More successful however were the two comedies he made with Deanna Durbin, It Started with Eve (1941) and Because of Him (1946). He also seemed to enjoy himself both as a blood-thirsty pirate in Captain Kidd (1945) and as a malevolent judge in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1948). Laughton was on top form again as a megalomaniac press tycoon in The Big Clock (1948). He had supporting roles as a Nazi in pre-war Paris in Arch of Triumph (1948); as a bishop in The Girl from Manhattan (1948); as a seedy go-between in The Bribe (1949); and a kindly widower in The Blue Veil (1951). (He played a bible-reading pastor in the multi-story A Miracle Can Happen (1947) but his sequence was deleted and replaced with another featuring Dorothy Lamour. In this form the film was re-titled On Our Merry Way). (See "Trivia" below).

Laughton made his first colour film in Paris as Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) and hammed it up enormously alongside Boris Karloff as a mad French nobleman in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door (1951). He was a tramp in O. Henry's Full House (1952) in which he had a one-minute scene with Marilyn Monroe. He became a pirate again, buffoon-style this time, in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952); he played Herod Antipas in Salome (1953) and repeated his role as Henry VIII in Young Bess (1953). He returned to England to star in Hobson's Choice (1954) directed by David Lean.

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 played a British admiral in Under Ten Flags (1960) and worked for the first and only time with his chief acting rival, Laurence Olivier, in Spartacus (1960) as a wily Roman senator.

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.

The Night of the Hunter

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.

Theatre

Laughton made his London stage debut in Gogol's The Government Inspector (1926). He appeared in many West End plays over the next few years and his earliest successes on the stage were in roles like Hercule Poirot in Alibi and William Marble in Payment Deferred, in which he made his Lyceum Theatre (New York) debut in 1931. He gave up the stage for a film career, but after the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII he appeared at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933 for a season of classic revivals. He appeared in roles like Macbeth, Lopakin in The Cherry Orchard, Prospero in The Tempest and had a major personal success as Angelo in Measure for Measure, but felt his appearance in the title role of Shakespeare's play Henry VIII was a mistake because audiences compared it with his Academy Award-winning film. At the end of 1936, Laughton played Captain Hook and Elsa Lanchester played Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie's play at the London Palladium.

Laughton worked closely with Bertolt Brecht on a new English version of Brecht's play Galileo. Laughton directed and played the title role at the play's premiere in Los Angeles on 30 July 1947 and later that year in New York.

Laughton had one of his most notable successes in the theatre by directing and playing the Devil in Don Juan in Hell beginning in 1950. The piece is actually the third act sequence from George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman, frequently cut from productions to reduce its playing time, consisting of a philosophical debate between Don Juan and the Devil with contributions from Doña Ana and the statue of Ana's father. Laughton conceived the piece as a staged reading and cast Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead (billed as "The First Drama Quartette") in the other roles. It was Boyer instead of Laughton who won a special Tony Award for the performance, possibly because Laughton was well-known for not caring about awards and never attended awards ceremonies when he was nominated for or won one, including the Oscars.

He 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, starring Henry Fonda as defense attorney Barney Greenwald, opened the same year as the film starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg and Jose Ferrer as Greenwald based on the original novel, but did not affect that film's box-office performance. Laughton also directed a staged reading in 1953 of Stephen Vincent Benét'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), and Judith Anderson. Laughton did not appear himself in either of these productions, but John Brown's Body was recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks.

Laughton returned to the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party which also had Elsa Lanchester and Albert Finney in the cast. He made his final theatre appearances as Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1959, although failing health resulted in both performances being disappointing, according to some British critics. The fact that he tried an unorthodox approach to the character of Lear, and was resented by some for having become an American citizen may have also something to do with the lukewarm critical reception, as well, although this is only speculation. His performance as King Lear came in for particular lambasting by critics, with many reviews saying that the portly actor looked more like Old King Cole than Shakespeare's creation, and critic Kenneth Tynan wrote that Laughton's Nick Bottom "...behaves in a manner that has nothing to do with acting, although it perfectly hits off the demeanor of a rapscallion uncle dressed up to entertain the children at a Christmas party". Unfortunately, although a British production of A Midsummer Night's Dream did air on television around this time, it was not the one with Laughton, but rather a 1958 production with Paul Rogers as Bottom.

Although he did not appear in any later plays, he continued to tour the US with staged readings, including a very successful appearance on the Stanford University campus in 1960.

Recordings

Laughton's voice first appeared on 78 rpm records with the release of five British Regal Zonophone 10 inch discs entitled Voice of the Stars issued annually from 1934 to 1938. These featured short soundtrack snippets from the year's top films. He is heard on all five records in, respectively, The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Barratts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, I, Claudius (curiously, since this film was unfinished and thus never released), and Vessel of Wrath. In 1937 he recorded Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on a 10 inch Columbia 78, having made such an impression with it in Ruggles of Red Gap.

He made several other spoken word recordings and 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 four 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 1943, 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.

A Brunswick/American Decca LP entitled Readings from the Bible featured Laughton reading Garden of Eden, The Fiery Furnace, Noah's Ark, and David and Goliath. It was released in 1958. Laughton had previously included several Bible readings when he played the title role in the film Rembrandt.

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.

Also, and deriving from the movie they made together, a complete radio show (18 June 1945) of 'The Canterville Ghost' was broadcast which featured Laughton and Margaret O'Brien. It has been issued on a Pelican LP.

His wife Elsa Lanchester made three LPs in the 1950s entitled "Songs for a Shuttered Parlour," "Songs for a Smoke-Filled Room," and "Cockney London." Laughton introduced the various numbers with spoken introductions on the first two and wrote the sleeve notes for the third.

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, two LP, Columbia Masterworks recording of the 1950 Broadway staging of George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell.

The other notable recording unavailable on CD is a two 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 revealed 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. In her autobiographical book, Lanchester relates a story regarding the police approaching Laughton at the door of their London flat, with a young boy whom Laughton had approached in Hyde Park. When Laughton confessed, Lanchester told him not to worry about it, that it didn't matter. "That's why he cried . . . when I told him it didn't matter."

Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936), The Big Clock (1948), 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.

Awards

Laughton won the New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Mutiny on the Bounty and Ruggles of Red Gap in 1953.

Academy Awards

• 1933 Won Best Actor in a Leading Role, The Private Life of Henry VIII
• 1936 Nominated Best Actor in a Leading Role, Mutiny on the Bounty
• 1958 Nominated Best Actor in a Leading Role, Witness for the Prosecution

References

==Bibliography=Who's Whio in the Theatre, London, 1947, 10th revised edition, p.892-3.

• Callow, Simon, Charles Laughton. A Difficult Actor (1987, rev. 1988). Biography and analysis of his film and stage work.
• Jones, Preston Neal, Heaven and Hel57) 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.
• Lyon, James K., Bertolt Brecht in America (1983). An extensively researched account of the German playwright's sojourn in the USA after fleeing Nazi Germany. The book covers the collaboration, preparatory work and 1947 stagings of Galileo with Charles Laughton.
• Lanchester, Elsa, Charles Laughton and I (1938), a biography of Laughton, and Elsa Lanchester Herself (1983), an autobiography. In her very personal memoirs Lanchester offers a somewhat unbalanced portrait of her late husband.
• Singer, Kurt, The Charles Laughton Story (1954).
• Higham, Charles, Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography (1976). Introduction by Elsa Lanchester.
• Brown, William, Charles Laughton: A Pictorial Treasury of his Films (1970).
• Diverse authors, articles in The Stonyhurst magazine: "Charles Laughton at Stonyhurst, by David Knight (Volume LIV, No. 501, 2005), "Charles Laughton. A Talent in Bloom (1899-1931)", by Gloria Porta (Volume LIV, No. 502, 2006),

External links

• Charles Laughton at IMDb
• Charles Laughton at the TCM Movie Database
• Charles Laughton at the Internet Broadway Database
• Rooting for Laughton: Laughtonians of the world, unite! (Weblog)
• Gay Greats

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