Laughton subsequently asked his business partner Erich Pommer to see the film clip.

His car was due to be examined by the expert witness Michael Laughton, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Shortly after Professor Laughton published his " Jenkins's Ear " research in the English Historical Review, a Royal Navy colleague wrote, on 26 October 1889, to inform the historian: " I have a curious book connected with the subject, published in London in 1739, entitled England's Triumph: or a complete History of the many signals victories gained by the Royal Navy & Merchant Ships of Great Britain, for the term of 40 years past over the insulting & haught Spaniards by Captain Charles Jenkins, who has too severely felt the effects of Spanish tyranny.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street is a 1934 American film depicting the real-life romance between poets Elizabeth Barrett ( Norma Shearer ) and Robert Browning ( Fredric March ), despite the opposition of her father Edward Moulton-Barrett ( Charles Laughton ).

Laughton was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the son of Robert Laughton and his wife Elizabeth ( née Conlon ), Yorkshire hotel keepers.

After I, Claudius, he and the ex-patriate German film producer Erich Pommer founded the production company Mayflower Pictures in the UK, which produced three films starring Laughton: Vessel of Wrath ( US Title The Beachcomber ) ( 1938 ), based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, in which his wife Elsa Lanchester co-starred ; St. Martin's Lane ( US Title Sidewalks of London ), about London street entertainers, which featured Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison ; and Jamaica Inn, with Maureen O ' Hara and Robert Newton, about Cornish smugglers, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s.

Laughton played a henpecked husband who eventually murders his wife in The Suspect ( 1944 ), directed by Robert Siodmak, who would become a good friend.

Laughton made his first color film in Paris as Inspector Maigret in The Man on the Eiffel Tower ( 1949 ) and, wrote the Monthly Film Bulletin, " appeared to overact " alongside Boris Karloff as a mad French nobleman in a version of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Door in 1951.

In 1955, Laughton directed The Night of the Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish.

The documentary Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter by Robert Gitt ( 2002 ) features preserved rushes and outtakes with Laughton's audible off-camera direction.

He played the mad Roman emperor Caligula in an uncompleted 1937 film version of Robert Graves's novel I, Claudius ( with Charles Laughton ); a kindly veterinarian who accidentally causes the death of a murderess ( played by Bette Davis ) in the 1952 suspense drama Another Man's Poison ; and the fool Wamba in the 1952 Ivanhoe ( with Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor ).

Throughout his illustrious career, Richard Garrick performed along with some of the brightest actors and actresses in stage and film history, including James Arness, Ed Begley, Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, James Dean, Julie Harris, Brian Keith, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, Victor Mature, Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe, Patricia Neal, Donald O ' Connor, Maureen O ' Sullivan, Anthony Quinn, Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Jean Simmons, Richard Todd, Spencer Tracy, Robert Wagner, John Wayne, Dennis Weaver and Richard Widmark.

Townshend was twice married — first to Elizabeth ( d. 1711 ), daughter of Thomas Pelham, 1st Baron Pelham of Laughton, and secondly to Dorothy Walpole ( 1686 – 1726 ), sister of Sir Robert Walpole.

* J. K. Laughton, " Spencer, Sir Robert Cavendish ( 1791 – 1830 )", rev.

* Hayes, Cedric J., and Laughton, Robert ( 1992 ).

Hayes, Cedric J., and Laughton, Robert ( 1992 ).

* Cedric J. Hayes and Robert Laughton, " The Gospel Discography, 1943-70 " Eyeball Productions, 2007, ISBN 0-9686445-8-9

The ambitious series frequently featured critically acclaimed dramas, including the original television versions of The Miracle Worker ( with Teresa Wright as Annie Sullivan ), and The Helen Morgan Story ( with an Emmy to Polly Bergen for her performance in the title role ), In the Presence of Mine Enemies ( Rod Serling's Warsaw ghetto drama starring Charles Laughton, with Robert Redford in an early role ), and the original television version of Judgment at Nuremberg, featuring Maximilian Schell in the role he would repeat in the 1961 film, but with an otherwise different cast, including Claude Rains in the Spencer Tracy role.

* The 1938 film The Vessel of Wrath, released in the U. S. as The Beachcomber, starred Charles Laughton as Ginger Ted, Elsa Lanchester as Miss Jones, Robert Newton as the Contrôleur, and Tyrone Guthrie as Reverend Jones.

Lanchester's husband Charles Laughton played Henry VIII and won an Academy Award for his portrayal.

Notable more recent productions of Measure for Measure are Charles Laughton as Angelo at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933, Peter Brook's 1950 staging at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with John Gielgud as Angelo, and a 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival production featuring Meryl Streep as Isabella and John Cazale as Angelo.

Charles Laughton won the 1933 Academy Award as Best Actor for his performance as Henry.

McLaglen won Best Actor for his portrayal of Gypo Nolan, beating out Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, and Franchot Tone for the better-remembered Mutiny on the Bounty, and Ford won Best Director.

" Selznick let him go, and Laughton recommended comedian and Dickens scholar W. C. Fields for the part, who was borrowed from Paramount Pictures.

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.

Laughton soon gave up the stage in preference for a film career and returned to Hollywood where his next film was White Woman ( 1933 ) in which he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a Cockney river trader in the Malaysian jungle.

Laughton played a cowardly schoolmaster in occupied France in This Land is Mine ( 1943 ), by Jean Renoir, in which he engaged himself most actively ; in fact, while Renoir was still working on an early script, Laughton would talk about Alphonse Daudet's story " The Last Lesson ", which suggested to Renoir a relevant scene for the film.

However, an original print of A Miracle Can Happen was sent abroad for dubbing before the Laughton sequence was deleted, and in this form it was shown in Spain as Una Encuesta Llamada Milagro.

Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role in Witness for the Prosecution ( 1957 ).

While Laughton is most remembered for his film career, he continued to work in the theatre, as when, after the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII he appeared at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933 as Macbeth, Lopakin in The Cherry Orchard, Prospero in The Tempest and Angelo in Measure for Measure.

They both received Academy Award nominations for their performances in Witness for the Prosecution ( 1957 ) — Laughton for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress — but neither won.

Laughton won the New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Mutiny on the Bounty and Ruggles of Red Gap in 1935.

* Rooting for Laughton: Laughtonians of the world, unite!

* Call him Jack ... Thank you for introducing me to Charles Laughton and to Life with a capital L!

All his other titles became extinct except for the Pelham Baronetcy of Laughton and the barony of Pelham of Stanmer, which were passed on to his first cousin once removed, Thomas Pelham ( for further history of these titles, see the Earl of Chichester ).

Laughton had to make the moment invisible: to act as if nobody was actually waiting for anything.

* Laughton, J. K. Middleton, Charles, First Baron Barham from Dictionary of National Biography ( Oxford: University Press, 1894 ).

( John Knox Laughton ) in the Dictionary of National Biography

* Laughton, J. K., Stokes, John Lort ( 1812 – 1885 ), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

* Higham, Charles Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography ( 1976 )

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 the London Gaiety Theatre in May.

Laughton and Pommer had plans to make further films, but the outbreak of World War II, which implied the loss of many foreign markets, meant the end of the company.

Laughton made a guest appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour, featuring Abbott and Costello, in which he delivered the Gettysburg Address.

Laughton worked on the film, which was directed by Otto Preminger, while he was dying from metastatic renal cell carcinoma ( kidney cancer ).

The processes by which Laughton painstakingly, over many weeks, created his Galileo — and incidentally, edited and translated the play along with Brecht — are detailed in an essay by Brecht, " Building Up A Part: Laughton's Galileo.

Laughton returned to the London stage in May 1958 to direct and star in Jane Arden's The Party at the New Theatre which also had Elsa Lanchester and Albert Finney in the cast.

Also, and derived from the film they made together, a complete radio show ( 18 June 1945 ) of The Canterville Ghost was broadcast which featured Laughton and Margaret O ' Brien.

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 ).

Laughton's bisexuality has been corroborated by several of his contemporaries and is generally accepted by Hollywood historians, However, actress Maureen O ' Hara, a friend and co-star of Laughton, claimed that Laughton told her that he and his wife never had children because of a botched abortion which Lanchester had early in her career while performing burlesque and that indeed his biggest regret was never having children of his own.

She commented that she had a " nerve " playing a woman in her sixties, to which Laughton replied, " Never not dare to hang yourself.

In 1946, after playing roles that had him wandering in and out of the saddle for many years, including a role alongside Charles Laughton in the cheaply made production Captain Kidd ( 1945 ), Scott appeared in Abilene Town, a UA release which cast him in what would become one of his classic images, the fearless lawman cleaning up a lawless town.

She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Come to the Stable ( 1949 ) and Witness for the Prosecution ( 1957 ), the last of twelve films in which she appeared with Laughton.

Wells ( Bluebottles, Daydreams and The Tonic ) in which Laughton made brief appearances.

She played a comical role in the 1948 thriller, The Big Clock, in which Laughton starred as a murderous, megalomaniac press tycoon.