Charles Laughton was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926.
65 Facts About Charles Laughton
2.
Charles Laughton played a wide range of classical and modern roles, making an impact in Shakespeare at the Old Vic.
3.
Charles Laughton portrayed everything from monsters and misfits to kings.
4.
Charles Laughton directed one film, the thriller The Night of the Hunter, which after an initially disappointing reception is acclaimed today as a film classic.
5.
Charles Laughton was born on 1 July 1899 in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, the son of Robert Charles Laughton and Eliza, Yorkshire hotel keepers.
6.
Charles Laughton's 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.
7.
Charles Laughton started work in the family hotel, though participating in amateur theatrical productions in Scarborough.
8.
Charles Laughton was permitted by his family to become a drama student at RADA in 1925, where actor Claude Rains was one of his teachers.
9.
Charles 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 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.
10.
Charles Laughton played the lead role as Harry Hegan in the world premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie in 1928 in London.
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Charles Laughton played the title roles in Arnold Bennett's Mr Prohack and as Samuel Pickwick in Mr Pickwick at the Theatre Royal in London.
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Charles Laughton played Tony Perelli in Edgar Wallace's On the Spot and William Marble in Payment Deferred.
13.
Charles Laughton took the last role across the Atlantic and made his United States debut on 24 September 1931, at the Lyceum Theatre.
14.
Charles Laughton commenced his film career in Great Britain while still acting on the London stage.
15.
Charles Laughton accepted small roles in three short silent comedies starring his wife Elsa Lanchester, Daydreams, Blue Bottles, and The Tonic, which had been specially written for her by H G Wells and were directed by Ivor Montagu.
16.
Charles Laughton made a brief appearance as a disgruntled diner in another silent film Piccadilly with Anna May Wong in 1929.
17.
Charles Laughton 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.
18.
Charles Laughton continued to act occasionally on stage, including a US production of The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht.
19.
Charles Laughton signed to play Micawber in David Copperfield, but after a few days shooting asked to be released from the role and was replaced by W C Fields.
20.
Charles Laughton largely moved away from historical roles when he played an Italian vineyard owner in California in They Knew What They Wanted ; a South Seas patriarch in The Tuttles of Tahiti ; and a US admiral during World War II in Stand By for Action.
21.
Charles Laughton played a Victorian butler in Forever and a Day and an Australian bar-owner in The Man from Down Under.
22.
Charles Laughton played a cowardly schoolmaster in occupied France in This Land is Mine, by Jean Renoir, in which he engaged himself most actively; in fact, while Renoir was still working on an early script, Charles Laughton would talk about Alphonse Daudet's story "The Last Lesson", which suggested to Renoir a relevant scene for the film.
23.
Charles Laughton played a henpecked husband who eventually murders his wife in The Suspect, directed by Robert Siodmak, who would become a good friend.
24.
Charles Laughton played sympathetically an impoverished composer-pianist in Tales of Manhattan and starred in The Canterville Ghost, based on the Oscar Wilde story in 1944.
25.
Charles Laughton appeared in two comedies with Deanna Durbin, It Started with Eve and Because of Him.
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Charles Laughton portrayed a bloodthirsty pirate in Captain Kidd and a malevolent judge in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case.
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Charles Laughton played a megalomaniac press tycoon in The Big Clock.
28.
Charles Laughton had supporting roles as a Nazi in pre-war Paris in Arch of Triumph, as a bishop in The Girl from Manhattan, as a seedy go-between in The Bribe, and as a kindly widower in The Blue Veil.
29.
Charles Laughton played a Bible-reading pastor in the multi-story A Miracle Can Happen, 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.
30.
However, an original print of A Miracle Can Happen was sent abroad for dubbing before the Charles Laughton sequence was deleted, and in this form it was shown in Spain as Una Encuesta Llamada Milagro.
31.
Charles Laughton made his first colour film in Paris as Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower 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.
32.
Charles Laughton played a tramp in O Henry's Full House.
33.
Charles Laughton became the pirate Captain Kidd again, this time for comic effect, in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd.
34.
Charles Laughton returned to Britain to star in Hobson's Choice, directed by David Lean.
35.
Charles Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role in Witness for the Prosecution.
36.
Charles Laughton played a British admiral in Under Ten Flags and worked with Laurence Olivier in Spartacus.
37.
In 1955, Charles Laughton directed The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish, and produced by his friend Paul Gregory.
38.
At the time of its original release it was a critical and box-office failure, and Charles Laughton never directed again.
39.
The documentary Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter by Robert Gitt features preserved rushes and outtakes with Laughton's audible off-camera direction.
40.
Charles Laughton made his London stage debut in Gogol's The Government Inspector.
41.
Charles Laughton appeared in many West End plays in the following few years and his earliest successes on the stage were as Hercule Poirot in Alibi ; 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 debut in 1931.
42.
Charles Laughton played the title role at the play's premiere in Los Angeles on 30 July 1947 and later that year in New York.
43.
Charles 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.
44.
Charles Laughton directed several plays on Broadway, mostly under the production of his friend and Broadway producer Paul Gregory.
45.
Charles Laughton directed a staged reading in 1953 of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body, a full-length poem about the American Civil War and its aftermath.
46.
Charles Laughton did not appear himself in either production, but John Brown's Body was recorded complete by Columbia Masterworks.
47.
Charles Laughton directed and starred in George Bernard Shaw's, Major Barbara which ran on Broadway from approximately November 1,1956, to May 18,1957.
48.
Charles Laughton returned to the London stage in May 1958 to direct and star in Jane Arden's The Party at the New Theatre which had Elsa Lanchester and Albert Finney in the cast.
49.
Charles Laughton 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.
50.
Charles Laughton 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, and Vessel of Wrath.
51.
Charles Laughton 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.
52.
In 1943, Charles 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.
53.
Charles Laughton had previously included several Bible readings when he played the title role in the film Rembrandt.
54.
Charles Laughton narrated the story on the soundtrack album of the film that he directed, Night of the Hunter, accompanied by the film's score.
55.
Charles 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.
56.
That same year, Charles 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.
57.
Charles Laughton threw himself into the role, travelling to China for several months to better understand his character.
58.
In 1927, Charles Laughton began a relationship with Elsa Lanchester, at the time a castmate in a stage play.
59.
Charles Laughton's bisexuality was corroborated by several of his contemporaries and is generally accepted by Hollywood historians.
60.
Charles Laughton was a Democrat and supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson during the 1952 presidential election.
61.
Charles Laughton checked in to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in July 1962 with what was described as a ruptured disc.
62.
Charles Laughton had surgery for the collapse of a vertebra and it was revealed he had cancer of the spine.
63.
Charles Laughton was in a coma for some time and died at home on 15 December 1962 from renal cancer.
64.
Charles Laughton's ashes were interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
65.
Charles Laughton won the New York Film Critics' Circle Awards for Mutiny on the Bounty and Ruggles of Red Gap in 1935.