Word: laughton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...said of some actors that no matter what part they are playing, they are always themselves. Edward G. Robinson is always Edward G. Robinson, for example, and so is Charles Laughton. But about all that can be said of Alcc Guinness as he metamorphoses from part to part is that he is one of the most consistently funny men in films today...
This flourishing new show business grew out of the possibilities that a bright young agent named Paul Gregory, now 30, spotted three years ago in Actor Laughton's talent for reading classics aloud. Laughton had started doing it to entertain troops in hospitals during World War II; Gregory thought it would also appeal to paying audiences. Against the advice of another Hollywood agent ("Most people can read nowadays-who needs it?"), Gregory mortgaged his car to book a concert-like tour called An Armful of Books. Laughton's readings from the Bible and Shakespeare on through James Thurber...
Gregory next proposed forming a drama quartet that would act as well as read, and Laughton seized on the idea as an effective way to present his favorite piece of Shavian writing. When Laughton applied for Shaw's permission (and terms), the old man sounded almost as skeptical as the Hollywood agent had been. "The Hell scene is such a queer business," he wrote, "that I can't advise you to experiment with it, but I should certainly like...
...experiment not only brought Shaw a fat stream of royalty checks until his death, but it stimulated a flagging Hollywood demand for Laughton and Charles Boyer in film roles and has given all four members of the quartet new earnings comparable to their income from the movies...
Thanks largely to a fine performance by Charles Laughton as a bumbling, middle-aged widower trying to woo his baby's pretty governess, The Blue Veil's first episode could hold its own as part of an omnibus film like Quartet. Governess Wyman, a widow who has lost her own baby, gently parries Widower Laughton's attentions and loses him willingly to his designing secretary (Vivian Vance), who thereupon cuts her adrift from the household and from the little toddler she has grown to love...