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Charles Laughton

From Alfred Hitchcock Wiki

  • born: 01/Jul/1899 (Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, UK)
  • died: 15/Dec/1962 (Hollywood, California, USA) - cancer of the gall bladder

Biography

Charles Laughton was a British-born American stage and film actor.

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. He served during World War I and was gassed, which may have had something to do with his untimely death from cancer at the age of 63.

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 the 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 Miserables" (1935), "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935) (as Captain Bligh, his most famous screen role, 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 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 directed by Alfred Hitchcock in Britain. 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". 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.

He also received an Academy Award nomination for his role in "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957).

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), but Laughton was dying from bone cancer.

Charles Laughton had one job as a director, 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.

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 -- and possibly self-interested -- account, when she learned about it was shocked, but eventually opted to remain married to him. She claims that as a result of this, she decided not to have children with him, a decision which caused great grief to Laughton, 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). In 1950, the couple became American citizens.

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

(Wikipedia)

Filmography

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