The first actor to portray Hercule Poirot was Charles Laughton.

Her next role was in St. Martin's Lane ( 1938 ) with Charles Laughton.

The episode garnering the most critical acclaim was " The Cop and the Anthem " starring Charles Laughton and Marilyn Monroe.

Charles Laughton was originally cast in the role of Mr. Micawber, and was authentically made-up with a bald cap, since Dickens describes the character as hairless.

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

Ruggles of Red Gap was adapted as a radio play on the July 10, 1939 episode of Lux Radio Theater, the December 17, 1945 episode of The Screen Guild Theater and the June 8, 1946 episode of Academy Award Theater, all with Charles Laughton and Charlie Ruggles reprising their film parts.

Charles Laughton ( 1 July 1899 – 15 December 1962 ) was an English-born American stage and film actor and director.

Laughton was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art ( RADA ) and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926.

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

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.

Then came The Barretts of Wimpole Street ( 1934 ) as Norma Shearer's character's malevolent father ( although Laughton was only three years older than Shearer ); Les Misérables ( 1935 ) as Inspector Javert ; one of his most famous screen roles in Mutiny on the Bounty ( 1935 ) as Captain William Bligh, co-starring with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian ; and Ruggles of Red Gap ( 1935 ) as the very English butler transported to early 1900s America.

The films produced were not successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy only when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role ( Quasimodo ) in The Hunchback of Notre Dame ( 1939 ), with Jamaica Inn co-star O ' Hara.

C. A. Lejeune, wrote Callow, was " shocked " by the poor quality of Laughton's recent work: " One of the most painful screen phenomena of latter years ", she wrote in The Observer, " has been the decline and fall of Charles Laughton.

" On the other hand, David Shipman, in his book The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, said " Laughton was a total actor.

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

At the time of its original release, however, it was a critical and box-office failure, and Laughton never directed again.

In 1926, he played the role of the criminal Ficsur in the original London production of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom ( The play was musicalized in 1945 by Rodgers and Hammerstein as Carousel, where Ficsur became Jigger Craigin, but Laughton never appeared in the musical version ).

Charles Laughton wound up introducing Presley on the Sullivan hour.

His career began in the theatre ; he made his first appearance on the London stage in 1958 in Jane Arden's The Party, directed by Charles Laughton, who starred in the production along with his wife, Elsa Lanchester.

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.

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 commenced his film career in England while still acting on the London stage.

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.

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 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.

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

In the U. S., Laughton worked with Bertolt Brecht on a new English version of Brecht's play Galileo.

Laughton played the title role at the play's premiere in Los Angeles on 30 July 1947 and later that year in New York.

Although he did not appear in any later plays, Laughton toured the U. S. with staged readings, including a very successful appearance on the Stanford University campus in 1960.

In 1943, Laughton recorded a reading of the Nativity story from St. Luke's Gospel, and this was released in 1995 on CD on a Nimbus Records collection entitled Prima Voce: The Spirit of Christmas Past.

Laughton also narrated the story on the soundtrack album of the film that he directed, Night of the Hunter, accompanied by the film's score.

That same year, Laughton hosted the first of two programs devoted to classical music entitled " Festival of Music ", and telecast on the NBC television anthology series Producers ' Showcase.

No serious research was undertaken until the late 1880s when John Knox Laughton, the founder of the Navy Records Society, uncovered contemporary letters from Jamaica in September and October 1731 which substantiated Jenkin's account of his losing an ear to a Spanish Guarda Costa on 9 April 1731 ( Old Style ; 20 April New Style ).

On September 9, with the song topping the US charts, Presley performed an abbreviated version of " Hound Dog " on The Ed Sullivan Show hosted by Charles Laughton.

The South Yorkshire Joint Railway act incorporated an earlier scheme, the Shireoaks Laughton & Maltby Railway ( Act passed 9 August 1901 ), a venture of the GCR and MR companies.

There have been four Broadway revivals, in 1928 at the Guild Theatre, 1956 at the Martin Beck Theatre and then the Morosco Theatre starring Glynis Johns, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Eli Wallach, Burgess Meredith, and Charles Laughton, who also directed, in 1980 at the Circle in the Square Theatre, and 2001 at the American Airlines Theatre, with Cherry Jones in the title role.

James Agate, reviewing Forever and a Day, wrote: " Is there no-one at RKO to tell Charles Laughton when he is being plain bad?

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.

Laughton had previously included several Bible readings when he played the title role in the film Rembrandt.

Atari accepted the proposal, and when the specifications were finalized in October 1978, Paul Laughton and Kathleen O ' Brien began work on the new language.

She then had another substantial part when she appeared again with her husband in the screen version of Agatha Christie's play Witness for the Prosecution ( 1957 ) for which both received Academy Award nominations-she for the second time as Best Supporting Actress, and Laughton, also for the second time, for Best Actor.

Her film career received a major boost when the director Alexander Korda took an interest and gave her a small but prominent role, under the name Merle Oberon, as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII ( 1933 ) opposite Charles Laughton.

Upon being published, Mahan struck up a friendship with pioneering British naval historian Sir John Knox Laughton, the pair maintaining this relationship through correspondence and visits when Mahan was in London.

Doug Laughton took over the job of team coach when Frank Myler retired from the position in 1978.