Charles Laughton

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For the politician, see Charles E. Laughton.

Charles Laughton
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
Occupations
  • Actor
  • director
  • producer
  • screenwriter
Years active1926–1962
Political partyDemocratic
Spouse
​
(m. 1929)​

Charles Laughton (

Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester
, with whom he lived and worked until his death.

Laughton played a wide range of classical and modern roles, making an impact in

the title character. He received two further nominations for his roles in Mutiny on the Bounty and Witness for the Prosecution, and reprised the role of Henry VIII in Young Bess. He portrayed everything from monsters and misfits to kings.[2] Among Laughton's biggest film hits were The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Ruggles of Red Gap, Jamaica Inn, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Big Clock, and Spartacus. Daniel Day-Lewis cited Laughton as one of his inspirations, saying: "He was probably the greatest film actor who came from that period of time. He had something quite remarkable. His generosity as an actor; he fed himself into that work. As an actor, you cannot take your eyes off him."[3]

In his later career, Laughton took up stage directing, notably in

Don Juan in Hell, in which he also starred. He directed one film, the thriller The Night of the Hunter
, which after an initially disappointing reception is acclaimed today as a film classic.

Early life and career

Laughton was born on 1 July 1899 in

Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalion,[8] and then with the 7th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment
.

He started work in the family hotel, though also participating in amateur theatrical productions in Scarborough. He was permitted by his family to become a drama student at

Theatre Royal (1928–29) in London.[9][10]

He played Tony Perelli in Edgar Wallace's On the Spot and William Marble in Payment Deferred. He took the last role across the Atlantic and made his United States debut on 24 September 1931, at the Lyceum Theatre. He returned to London for the 1933–34 Old Vic season and was engaged in four Shakespeare roles (as Macbeth, Henry VIII, Angelo in Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest) and also as Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Tattle in Love for Love. In 1936, he went to Paris and on 9 May appeared at the Comédie-Française as Sganarelle in the second act of Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui, the first English actor to appear at that theatre, where he performed the role in French and received an ovation. [citation needed]

Laughton commenced his film career in Great Britain while still acting on the London stage. He also accepted small roles in three short silent comedies starring his wife Elsa Lanchester, Daydreams, Blue Bottles, and The Tonic (all 1928), which had been specially written for her by H. G. Wells and were directed by Ivor Montagu. He made a brief appearance as a disgruntled diner in another silent film Piccadilly with Anna May Wong in 1929. He appeared with Lanchester again in a "film revue," featuring assorted British variety acts, called Comets (1930) in which they sang a duet, "The Ballad of Frankie and Johnnie." He 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 drug-smuggling ship's captain.

His New York stage debut in 1931 immediately led to film offers, and Laughton's first Hollywood film,

King Henry VIII), for which Laughton won the Academy Award for Best Actor
.

Film career

1933–1943

From the trailer for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

After his smashing success in The Private Life of Henry VIII, Laughton soon abandoned the stage for films and returned to Hollywood, where his next film was White Woman (1933) in which he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a Cockney river trader in the Malayan jungle. Then came The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) as the malevolent father of Norma Shearer's character (although Laughton was only three years older than Shearer); Les Misérables (1935) as Inspector Javert; one of his most famous screen roles in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) as Captain William Bligh, co-starring with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian; and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) as the very English butler transported to early 1900s America. He signed to play Micawber in David Copperfield (1934), but after a few days shooting asked to be released from the role and was replaced by W. C. Fields. [citation needed]

Back in the UK, and again with Korda, he played the title role in

Sidewalks of London), about London street entertainers, which featured Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison; and Jamaica Inn, with Maureen O'Hara and Robert Newton, about Cornish shipwreckers, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock
directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s.

The films produced were not commercially successful enough, and the company was rescued from bankruptcy only when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role (Quasimodo) in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), with Jamaica Inn co-star O'Hara. 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 early success in The Private Life of Henry VIII established him as one of the leading interpreters of the costume and historical drama roles for which he is best remembered (Nero, Henry VIII, Mr. Barrett, Inspector Javert, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, and others); he was also type-cast as arrogant, unscrupulous characters.[citation needed]

He largely moved away from historical roles when 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); and a U.S. admiral during World War II in Stand By for Action (1942). He played a Victorian butler in Forever and a Day (1943) and an Australian bar-owner in The Man from Down Under (1943). Simon Callow's 1987 biography quotes a number of contemporary reviews of Laughton's performances in these films. James Agate, reviewing Forever and a Day, wrote: "Is there no-one at RKO to tell Charles Laughton when he is being plain bad?" On the other hand, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times declared that Forever and a Day boasted "superb performances".[11]

C. A. Lejeune, wrote Callow, was "shocked" by the poor quality of Laughton's work of that period: "One of the most painful screen phenomena of latter years", she wrote in The Observer, "has been the decline and fall of Charles Laughton." On the other hand, David Shipman, in his book The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, said "Laughton was a total actor. His range was wide".[12]

1943–1962

Laughton in The Suspect (1944)
As Henry VIII in Young Bess (1953)

Laughton played a cowardly schoolmaster in

occupied France in This Land is Mine (1943), by Jean Renoir, in which he engaged himself most actively;[13] in fact, while Renoir was still working on an early script, Laughton would talk about Alphonse Daudet's story "The Last Lesson", which suggested to Renoir a relevant scene for the film.[14] Laughton played a henpecked husband who eventually murders his wife in The Suspect (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak, who would become a good friend.[15] He played sympathetically an impoverished composer-pianist in Tales of Manhattan (1942) and starred in The Canterville Ghost, based on the Oscar Wilde story
in 1944.

Laughton appeared in two comedies with

A Miracle Can Happen (1947), but his piece wound up being cut and replaced with another featuring Dorothy Lamour, and in this form the film was retitled as On Our Merry Way
. However, an original print of A Miracle Can Happen was sent abroad for dubbing before the Laughton sequence was deleted, and in this form it was shown in Spain as Una Encuesta Llamada Milagro.

Laughton made his first colour film in Paris as Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) and, wrote the Monthly Film Bulletin, "appeared to overact" alongside Boris Karloff as a mad French nobleman in a version of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door in 1951. He played a tramp in O. Henry's Full House (1952). He became the pirate Captain Kidd again, this time for comic effect, in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952). Laughton made a guest appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour (featuring Abbott and Costello), in which he delivered the Gettysburg Address. In 1953 he played Herod Antipas in Salome, and he reprised his role as Henry VIII in Young Bess, a 1953 drama about Henry's children.

He returned to Britain to star in

Advise & Consent (1962), for which he received favourable comments for his performance as a Southern US Senator (for which accent he studied recordings of Mississippi Senator John C. Stennis
).

The Night of the Hunter and other projects

Main article: The Night of the Hunter (film)

In 1955, Laughton directed The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish, and produced by his friend Paul Gregory. The film has been cited among critics as one of the best of the 1950s,[16] and has been selected by the United States National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress. At the time of its original release it was a critical and box-office failure, and Laughton never directed again. The documentary Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter by Robert Gitt (2002) features preserved rushes and outtakes with Laughton's audible off-camera direction.[17]

Laughton had intended to follow up The Night of the Hunter with an adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. Terry and Dennis Sanders were hired as writers, and press releases announced that Robert Mitchum was to star and that Walter Schumann would compose the score.[18][19] Following the box-office failure of The Night of the Hunter, Laughton was replaced by Raoul Walsh as director on the film and recruited an uncredited writer to rewrite the Sanders brothers' screenplay.[20][21]

Laughton also developed a remake of the 1927 silent film White Gold.[22]

Theatre

Laughton made his London stage debut in Gogol's The Government Inspector (1926). He appeared in many West End plays in the following few years and his earliest successes on the stage were as Hercule Poirot in Alibi (1928); he was the first actor to portray the Belgian detective in this stage adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and as William Marble in Payment Deferred, making his Lyceum Theatre (New York) debut in 1931.[citation needed]

Charles Laughton in 1940

In 1926, he played the role of the criminal Ficsur in the original London production of

Galileo. Laughton played the title role at the play's premiere in Los Angeles on 30 July 1947 and later that year in New York. This staging was directed by Joseph Losey. The processes by which Laughton painstakingly, over many weeks, created his Galileo—and incidentally, edited and translated the play along with Brecht—are detailed in an essay by Brecht, "Building Up A Part: Laughton's Galileo."[23]

Laughton had one of his most notable successes in the theatre by directing and playing the Devil in

Tony Award for his performance.[24]

He directed several plays on Broadway, mostly under the production of his friend and Broadway producer Paul Gregory. His most notable box-office success as a director came in 1954, with The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a full-length stage dramatisation by Herman Wouk of the court-martial scene in Wouk's novel The Caine Mutiny. The play, starring Henry Fonda as defence attorney Barney Greenwald, opened the same year as the film starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg and José 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 characterisations of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown), and Judith Anderson. Laughton did not appear himself in either production, but John Brown's Body was recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks.[citation needed] He directed and starred in George Bernard Shaw's, Major Barbara which ran on Broadway from approximately November 1, 1956, to May 18, 1957. Others in the cast were Glynis Johns, Burgess Meredith, Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Eli Wallach.[25]

Laughton returned to the London stage in May 1958 to direct and star in

Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1959, although failing health resulted in both performances being disappointing, according to some British critics. His performance as King Lear was lambasted by critics, and 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". Although he did not appear in any later plays, Laughton toured the US with staged readings, including a successful appearance on the Stanford University campus in 1960.[citation needed
]

Recordings

Laughton's voice, equally capable of a penetrating, theatre-filling shout and a soft, velvety tone, 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 Barretts 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 a strong impression with it in Ruggles of Red Gap.

He made several other spoken-word recordings, one of his most famous being 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 American Decca in 1944 as a four-record 78-rpm set, but was afterward 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 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. Laughton also narrated 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 derived from the film 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. [citation needed
]

A two-LP

Best Spoken Word Recording. Although the album has yet to be released on compact disc, it can now be heard in its entirety online.[26]

Television

With Tennessee Ernie Ford in a guest appearance on The Ford Show (1961)

Laughton was the fill-in host on 9 September 1956, when

television anthology series Producers' Showcase. One of his last performances was on Checkmate, in which he played a missionary recently returned from China. He threw himself into the role, travelling to China for several months to better understand his character.[27]

Personal life

In 1927, Laughton began a relationship with Elsa Lanchester, at the time a castmate in a stage play. The two were married in 1929, became US citizens in 1950, and remained together until Laughton's death. Over the years, they appeared together in several films, including Rembrandt (1936), Tales of Manhattan (1942) and The Big Clock (1948). Lanchester portrayed Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's fourth wife, opposite Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII. They both received Academy Award nominations for their performances in Witness for the Prosecution (1957)—Laughton for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress—but neither won.

Laughton's bisexuality was corroborated by several of his contemporaries and is generally accepted by Hollywood historians.[28][29][30][31] Hollywood procurer and prostitute Scotty Bowers alleged in his memoir Full Service that Laughton was in love with Tyrone Power and that his sex life was exclusively homosexual.[32] Actress Maureen O'Hara, a friend and co-star of Laughton, disputed the contention that his sexuality was the reason Laughton and Lanchester did not have children, saying Laughton told her he had wanted children but that it had not been possible because of a botched abortion that Lanchester had early in her career of performing burlesque.[33] In her autobiography, Lanchester acknowledged two abortions in her youth – one of the pregnancies purportedly by Laughton – but did not mention infertility.[citation needed] According to her biographer, Charles Higham, the reason she did not have children was that she did not want any.[34]

Laughton owned an estate on the bluffs above Pacific Coast Highway at 14954 Corona Del Mar in Pacific Palisades.[35] The property suffered a landslide in 1944, referenced by Bertolt Brecht in his poem "Garden in Progress".[36]

Laughton was a Democrat and supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson during the 1952 presidential election.[37]

Death

English Heritage blue plaque erected in 1992 at 15 Percy Street, London commemorating Charles Laughton

Laughton checked in to

renal cancer and bladder cancer.[39][40][41][42] His ashes were interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills).[43]

Awards and nominations

Laughton won the

New York Film Critics' Circle Awards for Mutiny on the Bounty and Ruggles of Red Gap
in 1935.

Academy Awards

For his contributions to the motion picture industry, Laughton has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard.[44]

Filmography

Main article: Charles Laughton filmography

Television

Laughton guest starred in a few television shows.

Theatre

Actor

first appearance, debut on the London stage (aka The Government Inspector)
police drama; he is the first actor to play detective Hercule Poirot
debut on the New York stage
police drama, Laughton is also the director (American version of Alibi)
drama, Laughton is also the director
comedy, Laughton is also the director
classic tragedy

Director

police drama, Laughton also acts in the play
drama, Laughton also acts in the play
with Judith Anderson. Recorded and released the same year on LP.
comedy, Laughton also acts in the play
  • 1954–1955:
    The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, adapted from the novel by Herman Wouk
drama, with Henry Fonda, adapted as The Caine Mutiny by Edward Dmytryk
drama, with Robert Mitchum

Producer

  • 1955: 3 for Tonight
musical revue, with Harry Belafonte

Parodies

Warner Brothers made three cartoons parodying Laughton's acting:

  • Roman Legion-Hare (1955): parody of Laughton as Emperor Nero
  • Good Noose
     (1962): parody of Laughton as a ship's Captain
  • Shishkabugs (1962): parody of Laughton as a spoiled king

In Buccaneer Bunny (1948), Bugs Bunny does a brief impression of Laughton's Captain Bligh.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ISBN 0-19-282745-6
    .
  2. ^ "Charles Laughton: dazzling player of monsters, misfits and kings". 24 November 2012. Archived from the original on 25 November 2012.
  3. ^ "Daniel Day-Lewis - 'Movies 101' Part 4". Archived from the original on 11 December 2021. Retrieved 31 August 2019 – via www.youtube.com.
  4. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37658. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  5. ^ "Charles Laughton profile". Biography.com. Archived from the original on 19 July 2010. Retrieved 10 May 2010.
  6. ISBN 085955239X
    .
  7. ^ RonaldBruceMeyer.com "1 July Almanac". Archived from the original on 8 May 2006. Retrieved 22 March 2006.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) Retrieved 12 August 2007.
  8. ^ "The Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalions". Retrieved 31 August 2019.
  9. ^ "Theatre collections: record view - Special Collections & Archives - University of Kent". www.kent.ac.uk. Retrieved 31 August 2019.
  10. ^ "Production of Mr Pickwick | Theatricalia". theatricalia.com. Retrieved 31 August 2019.
  11. ^ Crowther, Bosley (13 March 1943). "'Forever and a Day', Pageant of Some English People, Made Cooperatively in Hollywood, Is Attraction at the Rivoli". The New York Times.
  12. ^ David Shipman The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, London: Macdonald, 1989, p.353
  13. ISBN 0-15-164019-X
    (Lourié, who worked after hours to work on the decors, once found Laughton working after hours to get used to move in the scenery.)
  14. ^ Sesonske, Alexander (1996) Persistence of Vision (Maspeth), no. 12–13, 1996
  15. ^ Dumont, Hervé (1981) Robert Siodmak. Lausanne: L'Age d'homme
  16. ^ Ebert, Roger (1996). "Review: Night of the Hunter". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on 7 December 2008. Retrieved 3 December 2008.
  17. ^ Robert Gitt in The Guardian, 6 June 2003 "Charles Laughton directs The Night of the Hunter." Retrieved 25 October 2008.
  18. ^ "A Tale of Two Brothers" (PDF). Point of View Magazine: 20. Spring 2007. Retrieved 11 September 2017.
  19. ^ "The Naked and the Dead (1958) - Overview". TCM.com. Retrieved 14 June 2014.
  20. ^ "American Legends Interviews Paul Gregory on making: The Naked and The Dead". Americanlegends.com. Retrieved 14 June 2014.
  21. ^ "Recalling The Past (And The Future) With Terry Sanders|Filmmakers, Film Industry, Film Festivals, Awards & Movie Reviews". Indiewire. 13 February 1998. Retrieved 14 June 2014.
  22. ^ "Unproduced and Unfinished Films: An Ongoing Film Comment project". Film Comment. May 2012. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  23. ^ Brecht, Life of Galileo. Ed John Willett. London: Methuen, 1980. PP. 131–61.
  24. ^ "Winners". www.tonyawards.com. Retrieved 28 March 2023.
  25. ^ "Major Barbara – Broadway Show – Play | IBDB".
  26. ^ "THE STORY-TELLER". Retrieved 31 August 2019 – via Internet Archive.
  27. ^ Booklet/Insert, "The Best of 'Checkmate'", Timeless Media Group
  28. ^ Callow 1988
  29. ^ Crowe 2001
  30. ^ Higham 1976
  31. ^ Jones 2004
  32. ^ Bowers, Scotty (2012). Full Service. UK: Grove Press. p. 198.
  33. ^ O'Hara 2005
  34. ^ Higham 1976, p. 27
  35. ^ "Cap Equity :: Homes - Pacific Palisades, Ca - Palisades Paradise". Cap Equity. Retrieved 31 August 2019.
  36. ^ Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles by Erhard Bahr (page 96)
  37. ^ Motion Picture and Television Magazine, November 1952, page 33, Ideal Publishers
  38. ^ "Obituaries". Variety. 19 December 1962. p. 67.
  39. ^ a b c Associated Press (17 December 1962). "Charles Laughton Is Dead at 63; Character Actor For 3 Decades". The New York Times. p. 15. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
  40. ^ "Charles Laughton Dies at 63". The Daily News (St. John's, N.L.). AP. 17 December 1962. Retrieved 29 August 2017.
  41. ^ "Widow of Charles Laughton Had Many Talents : Actress Elsa Lanchester Dies at 84". Los Angeles Times. 27 December 1986. Retrieved 29 August 2017.
  42. ^ Callow, Simon (24 November 2012). "Charles Laughton: dazzling player of monsters, misfits and kings". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 11 January 2022. Retrieved 29 August 2017.
  43. ^ Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 26892-26893). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition
  44. ^ "Charles Laughton Inducted to the Walk of Fame". walkoffame.com. Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. 8 February 1960. Retrieved 7 December 2016.

References

External links

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