Re: "The Big Clock"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Woderful stuff Lou.  Wasn't Laughton also gay in real life? and fat to
>boot. Didn't he though turn his back on his old left friends when the witch
>hunt started? Brecht wrote at least one poem about him.
>
>regards
>
>Gary

Laughton was "married" to Elsa Lancaster, who played the bride of
Frankenstein in the same way that Paul Bowles was married to Sally Bowles.
>From a Dec. 27, 1986 Washington Post obituary:

====
In explaining once why she seldom wore her mink coat, she said, "With my
fuzzy hair I resemble a marmoset in a haystack when I put it on."

Marriage in 1929 to Laughton, with whom she first appeared on stage in
London in 1927, also affected the direction of her career.

In addition to "Witness for the Prosecution," in which Laughton played a
wily lawyer with a weak heart and she played an officious nurse assigned to
guard his health, Miss Lanchester and her husband appeared together in "The
Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933), "Rembrandt" (1936), "The Beachcomber"
(1938) and "The Big Clock" (1948).

She suspected that producers resented the feeling that if he worked she had
to be hired too, and as he advanced, fast becoming one of the memorable
actors of his time, she recognized a need to silence whispers that she was
working only on his account.

With him or without, her own performances almost always were widely
appreciated. Director Billy Wilder called her and her husband "the two most
original actors I ever worked with."

Miss Lanchester and Laughton came to this country in the early 1930s. They
became American citizens in 1950. Laughton died of cancer Dec. 15, 1962, at
the age of 63. Some years later, Miss Lanchester revealed that she had
learned after two years of marriage that her husband was homosexual.

"You must remember," she quipped to an interviewer about her failure to
perceive this earlier, "Charles was a very good actor."


Louis Proyect

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