Television
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 72 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 in order to better understand his character.
Read more about this topic: Charles Laughton
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)