Charles Laughton was an unlikely actor physically. Overweight and homely, he famously said, "I have a face like the behind of an elephant" and "I have a face that would stop a sun dial and frighten small children." Laughton was probably one of the few actors to have an honest opinion of himself. "A bank clerk can afford to think he looks like Clark Gable and be wrong. But a movie star must be objective. He has to know his face and personality so he can capitalize on them. If he thinks too highly of his talents, he is at once disillusioned when he views his latest picture. The bubble of an actor's ego is punctured the day he sees his image on the screen. His most horrible moments are watching himself in a bad performance."

He was born to Robert and Elizabeth Conlon Laughton on July 1, 1899 in his parents' hotel, The Victoria, in Scarborough, Yorkshire, England. He attended Stonyhurst but did not complete the certificate that would have enabled him to go to a University. Instead, at 18, he went into the Army as a private, turning down the commission he could have had, given his education and background. He later explained it by saying, "I did not want to command...to take responsibility for other people's lives." He went to France with the Royal Huntingdonshire Rifles where he was involved in a horrifying battle, of which he rarely spoke. His wife, actress Elsa Lanchester, later said that he told her he had had to stab several men to death. Right before the end of the war, he was gassed, which resulted in lifelong reoccurring rashes on his back. While his throat was affected, it soon healed and he was released from military service in 1919.

Laughton's parents had purchased the Pavilion Hotel and his father sent him to the famous Claridge's Hotel in London to learn the business as a clerk. At night, he used his money to buy theater tickets, once seeing the same play thirteen times. He returned to Yorkshire temporarily, and began to act and direct plays for The Scarborough Players. In 1923, he returned to London, where, with his family's support, he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, winning the Bancroft Gold Medal (the top prize) for The Merry Wives of Windsor the following year.

His first professional stage appearance was on April 28, 1926, when he played Osip in The Government Inspector at the Barnes Theater. Throughout the late 1920s, Laughton made a name for himself in roles like Hercule Poirot in Alibi the title role in Arnold Bennett's Mr. Prohack, with future wife Elsa Lanchester in the cast, Charles Dickens' Mr. Pickwick, and William Marble in Payment Deferred. His success in Payment Deferred brought him and Elsa Lanchester to New York in September 1931 to do the show on Broadway. The play received excellent reviews but the subject was too down-beat for audiences in the Great Depression and it closed after three weeks. Laughton then revised his role as Hercule Poirot in Alibi which also closed after three weeks and the couple returned to London.

Laughton had appeared in a few silent comedies in England with Lanchester, Daydreams, The Tonic (written for her by H.G. Wells), and Blue Bottles in 1928. The two also performed The Ballad of Frankie and Johnnie in a 1930 film revue called Comets. His performance in Payment Deferred brought him to the attention of Hollywood and the Laughtons were soon on their way back to the United States where he was signed to a contract at Paramount. His first role for the studio was in the horror film The Old Dark House (1932) opposite Boris Karloff and Gloria Stuart. He would also recreate Payment Deferred (1932) on screen. In 1932 alone, he made six films, which included playing the Emperor Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross.

Back in England, Laughton turned down $2,500 a week in films to return to the stage for the 1933-34 Old Vic season. He also managed to squeeze in a film for producer Alexander Korda, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), co-starring Elsa Lanchester as Anne of Cleves. The role made Laughton the first British actor to win a Best Actor Academy Award. The 1930s was a golden time in Laughton's career. It seemed impossible to pigeon-hole him. In only a few short years, he played such diverse characters as the gluttonous Henry VIII, the British valet Ruggles who is "sold" to the American Floud family and travels west, where he teaches them the real meaning of democracy in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), the cruel Capt. Bligh who is set adrift by Clark Gable's Mr. Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), the unbending Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (1935) and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Of his frequent roles as villains, Laughton said, "On the screen, I generally have been cast, mostly by my choice, as a wicked, blustering, or untidy character. Now I am ready to admit that in real life Charles Laughton is all of those things. I often bluster. I find it gets me my own way. I am notoriously wicked - especially to bores. I purposefully go in for villainous roles on the screen to find an outlet for the evil aspects of my own life considerably diluted. This makes life a lot easier on my wife."

After appearing in Rembrandt (1936), again with Lanchester, he appeared in the unfinished and now infamous production of I, Claudius (1937), Korda's attempt to film Robert Graves' novel which was supposedly halted due to co-star Merle Oberon's car crash. The next year, Laughton and Erich Pommer formed Mayflower Pictures. Their first film, in which Laughton co-starred again with Lanchester, The Beachcomber (1938), made Laughton the first actor-producer since the formation of United Artists by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in 1919. The film was shot at Elstree Studios in England with location work done in the south of France, and Paramount served as the distributor. Other films made by the company included Sidewalks of London (1938) with Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison and Jamaica Inn (1939), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with Robert Newton and a very young Maureen O'Hara, who was a protégé of Laughton's. None of these films was successful and the company was only saved from bankruptcy by Laughton's version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The outbreak of World War II ended the company and Laughton returned to the United States.

The roles Laughton received in the 1940s did not match the caliber of those of the previous decade, but they did give him some good opportunities to show his diversity. He co-starred with Carole Lombard as an unlikely Italian wine-grower in Napa Valley in They Knew What they Wanted (1940), with Deanna Durbin in the comedy It Started with Eve (1941) and in 1943, he was teamed with French director Jean Renoir in a patriotic drama called This Land Is Mine in which Laughton played a cowardly schoolteacher who becomes a resistance hero. Laughton and Renoir became close friends. In his autobiography, Renoir described Laughton's working method, "[He] had to play a scene in This Land Is Mine in which, from behind prison bars, he watched the Germans rounding up hostages they were going to shoot. Among them was the headmaster of his old school, whose name was Sorel [Philip Merivale]. All he had to do was to call out his name in the hope that his old friend would understand this word of farewell. We tried it a dozen times but it did not come right. We worked at it until the evening, and that prison sequence was the last that had to be shot on that set. Laughton kept saying, 'But I can't see Sorel. How can I call out to him?' I knew it was no use getting cross. 'What do you mean, you can't see him? He's there.' ...'Where?'...'In your own mind.'...Laughton at once declared, to my great surprise, that he was ready to shoot. The result was wonderful."

During the war, Laughton was tireless in donating his time to selling war bonds (he once sold over $200,000 worth of bonds during a seventeen hour radio broadcast), toured with the USO, and did weekly readings at the Birmingham General Hospital in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. "Contrary to what I'd been told in the entertainment industry, people everywhere have a common hunger for literature." After the war, he formed The First Drama Quartet with Agnes Moorehead, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and Charles Boyer. They began doing tours reading Shakespeare, Wolfe, Thurber, and Dickens. Laughton also did a tour of the country reading the Bible, "I cannot set down what I felt getting to know as much about the United States of America as I have. When I came back from my first reading trip, my wife said to me, 'You look tired out, and 15 years younger.' I felt proud that the things I had loved all my life were accepted, and felt proud to be of this forthright, open people, who, when you gave them what you had, filled you back up with happiness until you could bust." Laughton and Lanchester would become American citizens in 1950.

In the 1950s, Laughton's film work continued with The Blue Veil (1951), David Lean's Hobson's Choice (1954), and a one minute scene with Marilyn Monroe in O. Henry's Full House (1952). He even appeared as a pirate in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952). Lou Costello later said, "I was afraid to ask this great actor to do some of the hokum we had in the movie but after the first day, he was showing me how to hoke up the slapstick for more belly laughs." Laughton received another Academy Award nomination (and Golden Globe nomination) for his performance as Sir Wilfrid Robarts in Witness for the Prosecution (1957), again co-starring with Elsa Lanchester, who was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

During the 1950s, Charles Laughton became a stage director; his biggest success was The Caine Mutiny on Broadway in 1954. In 1955 Laughton made his directorial debut with The Night of the Hunter; he did not appear in it and it marked his only attempt at film directing. The movie starred Shelley Winters and Robert Mitchum, who became a close friend. "Charles was one of the very few people who was qualified to be a director. He was a very tolerant man, he had great humor, and he was...he would scream for what he wanted, but he was very humble. [...] He was a teacher, you know. He used to have people come and have classes in his house. He used to try to teach them that, in order to read Shakespeare, they didn't have to have a broad English accent as long as they spoke clear and intelligible English and knew what they were talking about." While it was not appreciated in its time, The Night of the Hunter has become a must for film students and is often on "ten best" lists for films of the 1950s. It was selected for preservation by The Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1992.

In 1960, Laughton worked with Laurence Olivier for the only time in Spartacus. Olivier said, "The only actor I ever knew who was a genius was Charles Laughton." Kirk Douglas agreed, "Laughton was an actor who dared. The modern trend in acting is to underplay and, as a result, many actors come up doing nothing. But when Laughton was on the stage or screen, you knew it."

Charles Laughton's final film was Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962) in which he plays a homophobic senator. While the film was shot, Laughton was diagnosed with cancer of the spine. He had had gall bladder problems and a heart attack in 1959. Director Billy Wilder, who had directed him in Witness for the Prosecution, had wanted to work again with Laughton in Irma la Douce (1963) but by July Laughton had been admitted to Cedar Sinai Hospital where he stayed receiving treatment until November when he was told he was terminal. He requested to go to home to die, which he did on December 16, 1962. Elsa Lanchester was by his side.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Finnegan, Joseph "Charles Laughton Loses His Battle with Cancer" The Altus-Times Democrat 18 Dec 62
Jones, Preston Neal Heaven and Hell to Play With: The Filming of The Night of the Hunter
"Charles Laughton's Roles Have Made Film History", Life 5 Dec 38
Martin, Fletcher "Charles Laughton in a Painting", Life 5 Nov 45
McNeil, Dougal The Many Lives of Galileo: Brecht, Theatre and Translation's Political Unconscious
"Charles the Great" Miami Daily News 17 Dec 62
Renoir, Jean My Life and My Films
"Actor Charles Laughton Dies after Battle with Cancer" The Sun 17 Dec 62
Wise, James E. and Baron, Scott International Stars at War