Elsa Sullivan Lanchester was a British-American actress with a long career in theatre, film and television.
28 Facts About Elsa Lanchester
2.
Elsa Lanchester met the actor Charles Laughton in 1927, and they were married two years later.
3.
Elsa Lanchester began playing small roles in British films, including the role of Anne of Cleves with Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII.
4.
Elsa Lanchester played supporting roles through the 1940s and 1950s.
5.
Elsa Lanchester was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Come to the Stable and Witness for the Prosecution, the last of twelve films in which she appeared with Laughton.
6.
Elsa Lanchester studied dance in Paris under Isadora Duncan, whom she disliked.
7.
Elsa Lanchester revived old Victorian songs and ballads, many of which she retained for her performances in another revue entitled Riverside Nights.
8.
Elsa Lanchester played his daughter in the stage play Payment Deferred though not in the subsequent Hollywood film version.
9.
Elsa Lanchester appeared in several other early British talkies, including Potiphar's Wife, a film starring Laurence Olivier.
10.
Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite Laughton again as Anne of Cleves in The Private Life of Henry VIII, with Laughton in the title role.
11.
Laughton was by now making films in Hollywood, so Elsa Lanchester joined him there, making minor appearances in David Copperfield and Naughty Marietta.
12.
Elsa Lanchester received top billing in Passport to Destiny for the only time in her Hollywood career.
13.
Elsa Lanchester played supporting roles in The Spiral Staircase and The Razor's Edge.
14.
Elsa Lanchester appeared as the housekeeper in The Bishop's Wife with David Niven playing the bishop, Loretta Young his wife, and Cary Grant an angel.
15.
Elsa Lanchester played a comical role as an artist in the thriller, The Big Clock, in which Laughton starred as a megalomaniacal press tycoon.
16.
Elsa Lanchester had a part as a painter specialising in nativity scenes in Come to the Stable, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
17.
Elsa Lanchester appeared on 9 April 1959, on NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford.
18.
Elsa Lanchester performed in two episodes of NBC's The Wonderful World of Disney.
19.
Elsa Lanchester continued to make occasional film appearances, singing a duet with Elvis Presley in Easy Come, Easy Go, and playing the mother in the original version of Willard, alongside Bruce Davison and Ernest Borgnine, which scored well at the box office.
20.
Elsa Lanchester was Jessica Marbles, a sleuth based on Agatha Christie's Jane Marple, in the 1976 murder mystery spoof Murder by Death, and she made her last film in 1980 as Sophie in Die Laughing.
21.
Elsa Lanchester published a book about her relationship with Laughton, Charles Laughton and I In March 1983, she released an autobiography, titled Elsa Lanchester Herself.
22.
Elsa Lanchester claimed Laughton had told her that the reason he and his wife never had children was because of a botched abortion Lanchester had early in her career when performing burlesque.
23.
Elsa Lanchester admitted in her autobiography that she had two abortions in her youth, but it is not clear if the second left her incapable of becoming pregnant again.
24.
Elsa Lanchester was a Democrat and she and Laughton were supportive of Adlai Stevenson's campaign during the 1952 presidential election.
25.
Shortly after the release of her autobiography, Elsa Lanchester's health took a turn for the worse.
26.
Elsa Lanchester required constant care and was confined to bedrest.
27.
Elsa Lanchester died in Woodland Hills, California on 26 December 1986, aged 84, at the Motion Picture Hospital from pneumonia.
28.
Elsa Lanchester's body was cremated on 5 January 1987, at the Chapel of the Pines in Los Angeles and her ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean.