LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Charles Laughton
built 606 days ago
Charles Laughton was an English stage and film actor. He became an American citizen in 1950. While best known for his historical roles in films, he started his career as a remarkable stage actor. In a moment when stage actors despised movies as a legitimate medium, only being interested in them as a source of income, Laughton showed keen and serious interest in the pioneering possibilities of film, and later other new media as radio and TV, proving that it was worth that quality work could be available to larger audiences other than theatre goers.
Source:
Charles Laughton was a distinguished Anglo-American stage and screen actor and director, as well as a noted orator and story-teller. He was ... a tormented soul who, for much of his life, suffered from self-loathing and internalized homophobia
Source:
From All Movie Guide: Tortured but brilliant British actor Charles Laughton's unique performances made him a compelling performer both on stage and in film. After starting his career as an hotel manager, Laughton switched to acting. His performances in London's West End plays brought him early acclaim, which eventually led him to the Old Vic, Broadway and Hollywood. When he repeated his stage success in The Private Life of Henry VIII for Alexander Korda on film in 1933, he won a "Best Actor" Oscar. Known both for his fascination with the darker side of human behavior and for his comic touch, Laughton should be watched as a frightening Nero in Sign of the Cross (1932), the triumphant employee in If I Had a Million (1932), the evil doctor in Island of Lost Souls (1932), the incestuous father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), the irrepressible Ruggles in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), the overbearing Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which garnered him another Oscar nomination, and the haunted hunchback in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), with a very young Maureen O'Hara. During the war years, he played some light roles in Tales of Manhattan (1942), Forever and a Day (1943) and The Canterville Ghost (1944), among others.
Source:
Although influenced by various popular genres, Charles Laughton's first and only film as a director remains doggedly iconoclastic. Like the infamous tattoos of L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E on Robert Mitchum's knuckles, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER tells of the dualities of human nature. The biblical/fairy-tale characters—the Preacher (Mitchum), the children and Rachel (Lillian Gish)—are wholly virtuous or uncommonly evil. The Preacher is depravity incarnate, the bogeyman delivered by fast cars and trains. In contrast the children seek nature and, in one of the film's sublime moments, they find safety afloat on a river, guarded by nocturnal animals. Though terrorized and stalked, childhood prevails in its innocence.
Source:
Synopsis: Having just recovered from a heart attack, fabled British barrister Sir Wilfred Robards (Charles Laughton) has been ordered by his doctor to give up everything he holds dear-brandy, cigars and especially courtroom cases. Robards' already shaky resolve to follow doctor's orders flies out the windowRead More
Source:
Born January 1899, July - Tortured but brilliant British actor Charles Laughton's unique performances made him a compelling performer both on stage and in film. After starting his career as an hotel manager, Laughton switched to acting. His performances in London's West End plays brought him early acclaim, which eventually led him to the Old Vic, Broadway and Hollywood.
Source: