It's interesting that the film industry has long had such a reputation for being a place hospitable only to pretty faces--and, indeed, it has usually been the Tyrones and Hedys, the Elizabeths and Rocks, the Brads and Kieras who grab the magazine covers and the biggest yelps on the Hollywood red carpets. That said, let us not forget that many of the most potent, most popular and most celebrated stars in the history of the movies have been quite the opposite - people who'd never get to first base in a beauty contest even if their mother was the sole judge. George Arliss, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Borgnine, Jose Ferrer, Anna Magnani are only a few of those on that long list. And of them all, maybe the least photogenic but most revered is our star of the month for November, the bulky but brilliant Charles Laughton.

Built somewhat akin to a tank made of rubber, a perennial scowl planted on his bulldoggish face, he nonetheless dominated every scene in every movie he was in, and did so not with actor's tricks but with acting genius. Billy Wilder, who directed Laughton in one of his most famous films, the 1957 Witness for the Prosecution (airing Nov. 24) called him "the greatest actor who ever lived." In a book by Cameron Crowe called Conversations with Wilder, the director told Crowe that "Laughton was everything that you can dream of, times ten," adding, "He was a tremendous presence with a wonderful vocal instrument. When he spoke to an audience, they knew. He did not just speak. He said something. He was an absolute marvel." Wilder only worked with Laughton once but was about to work with him again, signing him for a role in 1963's Irma La Douce, when the great actor died just before filming commenced. ("A sad, sad thing for everyone who knew him," said Wilder.)

One thing we plan to do this month is show you the wide range of Laughton's screen work, just in case his performances in Wilder's courtroom drama, or the 1935 blockbuster Mutiny on the Bounty in which he created an unforgettably villainous Captain Bligh (airing Nov. 10), or 1939's The Hunchback of Notre Dame in which he is so heartbreaking tender as a misshapen oddity of nature (showing Nov. 17), so far constitutes the extent of your acquaintance.

We'll be screening 18 Laughton movies in all, including his running the gamut from playing Rembrandt (Nov. 3) in a 1936 biopic, to two films in which he portrays the rascally Captain Kidd, seriously in a 1945 adventure tale with Randolph Scott (Captain Kidd, Nov. 10), then comically in the 1952 nadir of his career, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, also airing Nov. 10. Nor could we resist showing together on Nov. 3 the two times he played England's Henry VIII, the first time in 1934, winning him an Oscar® (The Private Life of Henry VIII), the other done 20 years later (Young Bess). Another Laughton jewel you shouldn't miss: 1934's The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Nov. 3), in which, despite tight Production Code rules at the time, he was able to add a subtext to his role of a dictatorial but devoted father to Norma Shearer so Freudian, so skillful, it slipped by the censors. We urge you not to let any of the 18 Laughton treats slip by you this month.

by Robert Osborne, TCM Host and Film Historian