Word: laughtons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Caught In the Closet. Charles Laughton's love of the theater took a quarter-century to find its outlet. He was born in 1899 in the Victoria Hotel in Scarborough, a resort town on the east coast of England. As the eldest of the three sons of hotel-owning Robert and Elizabeth Laughton, he was supposed to follow in their footsteps. But Charles showed his inclination early. He played endlessly with a toy puppet show until his brother Tom, who had built a guillotine out of a camera shutter, beheaded the marionettes. Laughton's next theatrical disaster came...
...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...