Charles Laughton - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Laughton was born in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, the son of Robert Laughton and his wife Elizabeth (née Conlon), Yorkshire hotel keepers. His mother was a devout Roman Catholic of Irish descent, and he attended Stonyhurst College, the pre-eminent English Jesuit school. He fought in World War I (during which he was gassed), serving first with the 2/1st Battalion of the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Battalion, and later with the 7th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment.

He started work in the family hotel business, while participating in amateur theatricals in Scarborough. Finally allowed by his family to become a drama student at RADA in 1925, Laughton made his first professional stage 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. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences with his talent and played classical roles in two plays by Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters. Laughton played the lead role of Harry Hegan in the world premiere of Sean 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 in Mr Pickwick.

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 and 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 acted the part in French and received an ovation. Laughton commenced his film career in Britain while still acting on the London stage. He took 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. 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 a "film revue", featuring assorted British variety acts, called Comets (1930) 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 smuggler.

His New York stage debut in 1931 immediately led to film offers and Laughton's first Hollywood film was The Old Dark House (1932) with Boris Karloff, in which he played a bluff Yorkshire businessman marooned during a storm with other travellers 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 turned out 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 Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on the life of King Henry VIII), for which Laughton won an Academy Award. He also continued to act occasionally on stage, including a U.S. production of The Life of Galileo by (and with) Bertolt Brecht.