Laughton, Charles

Laughton, Charles (1899–1962), stage and film actor, an American citizen since 1940, but born in England, where he made his first appearance on the stage in 1926 in Gogol's The Government Inspector at the Barnes Theatre. He then played the title-role in Mr Prohack (1927) by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock, and in 1931 starred in Payment Deferred, based on a novel by C. S. Forester, in London and New York. With his round moon face and bulky frame he was destined for character roles, at which he excelled. His season at the Old Vic in 1933, when he played Lopakhin in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Henry VIII, Macbeth, Prospero in The Tempest, and Angelo in Measure for Measure, greatly enhanced his reputation. After his Captain Hook in Barrie's Peter Pan at the London Palladium (1936) he was seen in 1937 at the Comédie-Française in Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui, being the first English actor to appear there. He was then seen only intermittently on stage, being engrossed in his outstanding film career, but he returned to the theatre in Los Angeles in 1947 in Brecht's Galileo, having adapted the English text in collaboration with the author. In New York in 1951 he directed and played the Devil in the Don Juan in Hell section of Shaw's Man and Superman. He directed his own adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét's poem John Brown's Body (1952), Wouk's The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954), and Shaw's Major Barbara (1956), in which he also appeared. He was seen once more in London in Jane Arden's The Party (1958), which he also directed, and in 1959 played King Lear, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

His wife Elsa Lanchester (1902–86) appeared with him in Payment Deferred, The Tempest, Peter Pan (in the title-role), and The Party, and gave the solo performance Elsa Lanchester—Herself (1961) directed by her husband.