Early years Laughton was born on 1 July 1899 in
Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, the son of Robert Laughton (1869–1924) and Eliza (née Conlon; 1869–1953), Yorkshire hotel keepers. A
blue plaque marks his birthplace. His mother was a devout
Roman Catholic of Irish descent, and she sent him to briefly attend a local boys' school,
Scarborough College, before sending him to
Stonyhurst College, the pre-eminent English
Jesuit school. Laughton served in
World War I, during which he was
gassed, serving first with the 2/1st Battalion of the
Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalion, and then with the 7th Battalion of the
Northamptonshire Regiment. He started work in the family hotel, though also participating in amateur theatrical productions in Scarborough. He was permitted by his family to become a drama student at
RADA in 1925, where actor
Claude Rains was one of his teachers. Laughton made his first professional appearance on 28 April 1926 at the
Barnes Theatre, as Osip in the comedy
The Government Inspector, in which he also appeared at London's
Gaiety Theatre in May. He impressed audiences with his talent and had classical roles in two Chekov plays,
The Cherry Orchard and
The Three Sisters. Laughton played the lead role as Harry Hegan in the world premiere of
Seán O'Casey's
The Silver Tassie in 1928 in London. He played the title roles in Arnold Bennett's
Mr Prohack (
Elsa Lanchester was also in the cast) and as
Samuel Pickwick in
Mr. Pickwick at the
Theatre Royal (1928–29) in London. He played Tony Perelli in
Edgar Wallace's
On the Spot and William Marble in
Payment Deferred. He took the last role across the Atlantic and made his United States debut on 24 September 1931, at the
Lyceum Theatre. He returned to London for the 1933–34 Old Vic season and was engaged in four Shakespeare roles (as Macbeth, Henry VIII, Angelo in
Measure for Measure and Prospero in
The Tempest) and also as Lopakhin in
The Cherry Orchard, Canon Chasuble in
The Importance of Being Earnest, and Tattle in
Love for Love. In 1936, he went to Paris and on 9 May appeared at the
Comédie-Française as Sganarelle in the second act of
Molière's
Le Médecin malgré lui, the first English actor to appear at that theatre, where he performed the role in French and received an ovation. Laughton commenced his film career in Great Britain while still acting on the London stage. He also accepted small roles in three short silent comedies starring his wife
Elsa Lanchester,
Daydreams, Blue Bottles, and
The Tonic (all 1928), which had been specially written for her by
H. G. Wells and were directed by
Ivor Montagu. He made a brief appearance as a disgruntled diner in another silent film
Piccadilly with
Anna May Wong in 1929. He appeared with Lanchester again in
Comets (1930), a
film revue featuring assorted British variety acts, in which they sang a duet, "
The Ballad of Frankie and Johnnie". He made two other early British talkies:
Wolves with
Dorothy Gish (1930) from a play set in a whaling camp in the frozen north, and
Down River (1931), in which he played a drug-smuggling ship's captain. His New York stage debut in 1931 immediately led to film offers, and Laughton's first Hollywood film,
The Old Dark House (1932) with
Boris Karloff, in which he played a bluff
Yorkshire businessman marooned during a storm with other travelers in a creepy remote Welsh manor. He then played a demented submarine commander in
Devil and the Deep with
Tallulah Bankhead,
Gary Cooper and
Cary Grant, and followed this with his best-remembered film role of that year as
Nero in
Cecil B. DeMille's
The Sign of the Cross. Laughton gave other memorable performances during that first Hollywood trip, repeating his stage role as a murderer in
Payment Deferred, playing
H. G. Wells' mad vivisectionist Dr. Moreau in
Island of Lost Souls, and the meek raspberry-blowing clerk in the brief segment of
If I Had A Million, directed by
Ernst Lubitsch. He appeared in six Hollywood films in 1932. His association with director
Alexander Korda began in 1933 with the hugely successful
The Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on the life of King
Henry VIII), for which Laughton won the
Academy Award for Best Actor.
1933–1943 (1935) After his success in
The Private Life of Henry VIII, Laughton soon abandoned the stage for films and returned to Hollywood, where his next film was
White Woman (1933) in which he co-starred with
Carole Lombard as a
Cockney river trader in the
Malayan jungle. Then came
The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) as the malevolent father of
Norma Shearer's character (although Laughton was only three years older than Shearer);
Les Misérables (1935) as Inspector
Javert; one of his most famous screen roles in
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) as Captain
William Bligh, co-starring with
Clark Gable as
Fletcher Christian; and
Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) as the very English butler transported to early 1900s America. He signed to play Micawber in
David Copperfield (1934), but after a few days' shooting asked to be released from the role and was replaced by
W. C. Fields. Back in the UK, and again with Korda, he played the title role in
Rembrandt (1936). In 1937, also for Korda, he starred in an ill-fated film version of the classic novel,
I, Claudius, by
Robert Graves, which was abandoned during filming owing to the injuries suffered by co-star
Merle Oberon in a car crash. After
I, Claudius, he and the expatriate German film producer
Erich Pommer founded the production company
Mayflower Pictures in the UK, which produced three films starring Laughton:
Vessel of Wrath (US title
The Beachcomber) (1938), based on a story by
W. Somerset Maugham, in which his wife, Elsa Lanchester, co-starred; ''
St. Martin's Lane (US title Sidewalks of London), about London street entertainers, which featured Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison; and Jamaica Inn'', with
Maureen O'Hara and
Robert Newton, about
Cornish shipwreckers, based on
Daphne du Maurier's novel (and the last film
Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain), before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. The films produced were not commercially successful enough, and the company was rescued from bankruptcy only when
RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role (
Quasimodo) in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), with
Jamaica Inn co-star O'Hara. 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. Laughton's early success in
The Private Life of Henry VIII established him as one of the leading interpreters of the costume and historical drama roles for which he is best remembered (Nero, Henry VIII, Mr. Barrett, Inspector Javert, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, and others); he was also type-cast as arrogant, unscrupulous characters. He largely moved away from historical roles when he played an Italian vineyard owner in California in
They Knew What They Wanted (1940); a South Seas patriarch in
The Tuttles of Tahiti (1942); and a US admiral during World War II in
Stand By for Action (1942). He played a
Victorian butler in
Forever and a Day (1943) and an Australian bar-owner in
The Man from Down Under (1943).
Simon Callow's 1987 biography quotes a number of contemporary reviews of Laughton's performances in these films.
James Agate, reviewing
Forever and a Day, wrote: "Is there no-one at RKO to tell Charles Laughton when he is being plain bad?" On the other hand,
Bosley Crowther of
The New York Times declared that
Forever and a Day boasted "superb performances".
C. A. Lejeune, wrote Callow, was "shocked" by the poor quality of Laughton's work of that period: "One of the most painful screen phenomena of latter years", she wrote in
The Observer, "has been the decline and fall of Charles Laughton." On the other hand,
David Shipman, in his book
The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, said "Laughton was a total actor. His range was wide".
1943–1962 Laughton played a cowardly schoolmaster in
occupied France in
This Land Is Mine (1943), by
Jean Renoir, in which he engaged himself most actively; in fact, while Renoir was still working on an early script, Laughton would talk about
Alphonse Daudet's story "The Last Lesson", which suggested to Renoir a relevant scene for the film. Laughton played a henpecked husband who eventually murders his wife in
The Suspect (1944), directed by
Robert Siodmak, who would become a good friend. He played sympathetically an impoverished composer-pianist in
Tales of Manhattan (1942) and starred in
The Canterville Ghost, based on
the Oscar Wilde story in 1944. Laughton appeared in two comedies with
Deanna Durbin,
It Started with Eve (1941) and
Because of Him (1946). He portrayed a bloodthirsty pirate in
Captain Kidd (1945) and a malevolent judge in Alfred Hitchcock's
The Paradine Case (1947). Laughton played a megalomaniac press tycoon in
The Big Clock (1948). He had supporting roles as a Nazi in pre-war Paris in
Arch of Triumph (1948), as a bishop in
The Girl from Manhattan (1948), as a seedy go-between in
The Bribe (1949), and as a kindly widower in
The Blue Veil (1951). He played a Bible-reading pastor in the multi-story
A Miracle Can Happen (1947), but his piece wound up being cut and replaced with another featuring
Dorothy Lamour, and in this form the film was retitled as
On Our Merry Way. However, an original print of
A Miracle Can Happen was sent abroad for dubbing before the Laughton sequence was deleted, and in this form it was shown in Spain as
Una Encuesta Llamada Milagro. Laughton made his first colour film in Paris as
Inspector Maigret in
The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949) and, wrote the
Monthly Film Bulletin, "appeared to overact" alongside
Boris Karloff as a mad French nobleman in a version of
Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Strange Door in 1951. He played a tramp in ''
O. Henry's Full House (1952). He became the pirate Captain Kidd again, this time for comic effect, in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952). Laughton made a guest appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour
(featuring Abbott and Costello), in which he delivered the Gettysburg Address. In 1953 he played Herod Antipas in Salome, and he reprised his role as Henry VIII in Young Bess'', a 1953 drama about Henry's children. He returned to Britain to star in ''
Hobson's Choice (1954), directed by David Lean. Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role in Witness for the Prosecution (1957). He played a British admiral in Under Ten Flags (1960) and worked with Laurence Olivier in Spartacus (1960). His final film was Advise & Consent'' (1962), for which he received favourable comments for his performance as a Southern US Senator (for which accent he studied recordings of
Mississippi Senator
John C. Stennis).
The Night of the Hunter and other projects In 1955, Laughton directed
The Night of the Hunter, starring
Robert Mitchum,
Shelley Winters and
Lillian Gish, and produced by his friend
Paul Gregory. The film has been cited among critics as one of the best of the 1950s, and has been selected by the United States
National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress. At the time of its original release it was a critical and box-office failure, and Laughton never directed again. The documentary
Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter by Robert Gitt (2002) features preserved rushes and outtakes with Laughton's audible off-camera direction. Laughton had intended to follow up
The Night of the Hunter with an adaptation of
Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead.
Terry and
Dennis Sanders were hired as writers, and press releases announced that Robert Mitchum was to star and that
Walter Schumann would compose the score. Following the box-office failure of
The Night of the Hunter, Laughton was replaced by
Raoul Walsh as director on
the film and recruited an uncredited writer to rewrite the Sanders brothers' screenplay. Laughton also developed a remake of the 1927
silent film White Gold.
Theatre Laughton made his London stage debut in Gogol's
The Government Inspector (1926). He appeared in many
West End plays in the following few years and his earliest successes on the stage were as
Hercule Poirot in
Alibi (1928); he was the first actor to portray the Belgian detective in this stage adaptation of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and as William Marble in
Payment Deferred, making his Lyceum Theatre (New York) debut in 1931. In 1926, he played the role of the criminal Ficsur in the original London production of
Ferenc Molnár's
Liliom (The play became a musical in 1945 by
Rodgers and Hammerstein as
Carousel, where Ficsur became Jigger Craigin, but Laughton never appeared in the musical version). While Laughton is most remembered for his film career, he continued to work in the theatre, as when, after the success of
The Private Life of Henry VIII he appeared at the
Old Vic Theatre in 1933 as
Macbeth, Lopakin in
The Cherry Orchard,
Prospero in
The Tempest and
Angelo in
Measure for Measure. In the US, Laughton worked with
Bertolt Brecht on a new English version of Brecht's play
Galileo. Laughton played the title role at the play's premiere in Los Angeles on 30 July 1947 and later that year in New York. This staging was directed by
Joseph Losey. The processes by which Laughton painstakingly, over many weeks, created his Galileo—and incidentally, edited and translated the play along with Brecht—are detailed in an essay by Brecht, "Building Up A Part: Laughton's Galileo." Laughton had one of his most notable successes in the theatre by directing and playing the Devil in
Don Juan in Hell beginning in 1950. The piece is actually the third act sequence from
George Bernard Shaw's play
Man and Superman, frequently cut from productions to reduce its playing time, consisting of a philosophical debate between
Don Juan and the Devil with contributions from Doña Ana and the statue of Ana's father. Laughton conceived the piece as a staged reading and cast
Charles Boyer,
Cedric Hardwicke and
Agnes Moorehead (billed as "The First Drama Quartette") in the other roles. Boyer won a special
Tony Award for his performance. He directed several plays on Broadway, mostly under the production of his friend and Broadway producer
Paul Gregory. His most notable box-office success as a director came in 1954, with
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, a full-length stage dramatisation by
Herman Wouk of the court-martial scene in Wouk's novel
The Caine Mutiny. The play, starring
Henry Fonda as defence attorney Barney Greenwald, opened the same year as the film starring
Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg and
José Ferrer as Greenwald based on the original novel, but did not affect that film's box-office performance. Laughton also directed a staged reading in 1953 of
Stephen Vincent Benét's ''
John Brown's Body, a full-length poem about the American Civil War and its aftermath. The production starred Tyrone Power, Raymond Massey (re-creating his film characterisations of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown), and Judith Anderson. Laughton did not appear himself in either production, but John Brown's Body'' was recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks. He directed and starred in
George Bernard Shaw's,
Major Barbara which ran on Broadway from approximately 1 November 1956, to 18 May 1957. Others in the cast were
Glynis Johns,
Burgess Meredith,
Cornelia Otis Skinner, and
Eli Wallach. Laughton returned to the London stage in May 1958 to direct and star in
Jane Arden's
The Party at the
New Theatre which also had
Elsa Lanchester and
Albert Finney in the cast. He made his final appearances on stage as
Nick Bottom in ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream'', and as
King Lear at the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1959, although failing health resulted in both performances being disappointing, according to some British critics. His performance as King Lear was lambasted by critics, and
Kenneth Tynan wrote that Laughton's Nick Bottom "... behaves in a manner that has nothing to do with acting, although it perfectly hits off the demeanor of a rapscallion uncle dressed up to entertain the children at a Christmas party". Although he did not appear in any later plays, Laughton toured the US with staged readings, including a successful appearance on the
Stanford University campus in 1960.
Recordings Laughton's voice, equally capable of a penetrating, theatre-filling shout and a soft, velvety tone, first appeared on 78-rpm records with the release of five British Regal Zonophone 10-inch discs entitled
Voice of the Stars issued annually from 1934 to 1938. These featured short soundtrack snippets from the year's top films. He is heard on all five records in, respectively,
The Private Life of Henry VIII,
The Barretts of Wimpole Street,
Mutiny on the Bounty,
I, Claudius (curiously, since this film was unfinished and thus never released), and
Vessel of Wrath. In 1937 he recorded Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address on a 10-inch Columbia 78, having made a strong impression with it in
Ruggles of Red Gap. He made several other spoken-word recordings, one of his most famous being his one-man album of
Charles Dickens's ''Mr. Pickwick's Christmas'', a twenty-minute version of the Christmas chapter from Dickens's
The Pickwick Papers. It was first released by American
Decca in 1944 as a four-record 78-rpm set, but was afterward transferred to LP. It frequently appeared on LP with a companion piece, Decca's 1941 adaptation of Dickens's
A Christmas Carol, starring
Ronald Colman as Scrooge. Both stories were released together on a
Deutsche Grammophon CD for Christmas 2005. In 1943, Laughton recorded a reading of the Nativity story from
St. Luke's Gospel, and this was released in 1995 on CD on a
Nimbus Records collection entitled
Prima Voce: The Spirit of Christmas Past. A Brunswick/American Decca LP entitled
Readings from the Bible featured Laughton reading Garden of Eden, The Fiery Furnace, Noah's Ark, and David and Goliath. It was released in 1958. Laughton had previously included several Bible readings when he played the title role in the film
Rembrandt. Laughton also narrated the story on the soundtrack album of the film that he directed,
Night of the Hunter, accompanied by the film's score. This album has also been released on CD. Also, and derived from the film they made together, a complete radio show (18 June 1945) of
The Canterville Ghost was broadcast which featured Laughton and Margaret O'Brien. It has been issued on a Pelican LP. A two-LP
Capitol Records album was released in 1962, the year of Laughton's death, entitled
The Story Teller: A Session with Charles Laughton. Taken from Laughton's one-man stage shows, it compiles dramatic readings from several sources. Three of the excerpts are broadcast annually on a
Minnesota Public Radio Thanksgiving program entitled
Giving Thanks.
The Story Teller won a
Grammy in 1962 for
Best Spoken Word Recording. Although the album has yet to be released on compact disc, it can now be heard in its entirety online.
Television in a guest appearance on
The Ford Show (1961) Laughton was the fill-in host on 9 September 1956, when
Elvis Presley made his first of three appearances on
CBS's
The Ed Sullivan Show, which garnered 60.7 million viewers (
Ed Sullivan was recuperating from a car accident). That same year, Laughton hosted the first of two programmes devoted to classical music entitled "Festival of Music", and telecast on the
NBC television anthology series ''
Producers' Showcase. One of his last performances was on Checkmate'', in which he played a missionary recently returned from China. He threw himself into the role, travelling to China for several months to better understand his character. ==Personal life==