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

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.

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.

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.

Hamer won a scholarship to Cambridge University but was sent down ( expelled ), and began his career in 1934 as a cutting room assistant and from 1935 worked as a film editor involved with such films as Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn ( 1939 ) co-produced by Charles Laughton.

He is a method actor, taught mainly by Lee Strasberg and Charles Laughton at the Actors Studio in New York.

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.

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

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.

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 ).

He turned it down ( the job ultimately went to Richard Burton ) and, on 1 November 1952, left on a ten week national tour with John Brown's Body, a three-person dramatic reading of Stephen Vincent Benét's narrative poem, adapted and directed by Charles Laughton, and featuring Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey ; which culminated in a run of 65 shows between February and April 1953 at the New Century Theater on Broadway.

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.

Charles Laughton was also nominated for a British Academy Film Award for Best Foreign Actor.

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.

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

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.

* 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.

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.

* Mutiny on the Bounty ( 1935 film ), a film directed by Frank Lloyd, starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable

For example, in 1935 Clark Gable, Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone were each nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for Mutiny on the Bounty.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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 ).

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

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.

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 programs devoted to classical music entitled " Festival of Music ", and telecast on the NBC television anthology series Producers ' Showcase.