Word: laughton
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...Stonyhurst College, Charles landed a part in a school play. His first press notice read, in its entirety: "We hope to see some more of Mr. Laughton." Others hoped to see less. A Scarborough neighbor described the adolescent Charles: "He was one of the most ungainly schoolboys I ever saw, very fat, with a huge head, and a little cap. We should dearly have liked to have kicked...
After Stonyhurst, Charles was sent to London, to learn hotelkeeping at Claridge's. He spent most of his spare time, and all his money, at the theater; he managed to see Chu-Chin-Chow 13 times. In World War I, Laughton was a private by choice ("Something told me I might not be the kind of fellow to take command of men under fire"), was gassed and invalided home. He spent the next five years in Scarborough, ostensibly working in his family's hotel; actually, he was hanging about amateur theatricals. His persistence paid off. His family gave...
Horrible Higgins. He arrived, says a fellow student, as "a great lout of a fellow with a North Country accent, who couldn't find his hat because he was sitting on it." But when Laughton began to recite, he ceased to be a figure of fun: he held the room spellbound. For his portrayal of Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion, he won the academy's highest award. Shaw dropped in on one rehearsal and commented: "Young man, you were horrible as my Higgins, but nothing will stop you from getting to the top of the tree...
Shaw knew an actor when he saw one. Within twelve months Laughton appeared in eight West End plays, and kept on climbing. In 1929 he married Elsa Lanchester, who had played his secretary in Arnold Bennett's Mr. Prohack. Elsa, a redhead, was the toast of the Bloomsbury intellectuals. She had danced with Isadora Duncan, was part-owner of a hole-in-the-wall nightclub, and was getting tired of being called "elfin." In her elfin book, Charles Laughton and I, Elsa says they first became interested in one another when they discovered that, though ordinarily gabby, they were...
During the war years, Laughton was restless. He tried to lose himself in his collection of art (Renoir, Cezanne, Utrillo), and in organizing classical jam sessions. Then he began dropping into U.S. Army hospitals, where he read aloud from Charles Dickens, James Thurber, Aesop, Thomas Wolfe, the Bible. Says Laughton: "The men in the hospital, unlike the people in the theaters, when they didn't understand said so out loud and if I didn't understand either I learned to admit it . . . And when I did understand and they did not, I knew I wasn't doing...