The actor Charles Laughton was born on this date in 1899. 10 things you might not know about him:
He was born in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, the son of a hotel keeper. He was expected to go into the family business when he left school, but was drawn to a different career. In 1925 he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
His first professional appearance on stage was on 28 April 1926 at the Barnes Theatre, as Osip in the comedy The Government Inspector.
In 1928, he became the first actor to play Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot in a play called Alibi.
He served in the first world war as a private with the Huntingdonshire Cyclist Regiment, and later with 7th Bn. Northamptonshire Regiment in the Western Front. He was injured by mustard gas before the armistice. Raised as a Catholic, he reportedly became an agnostic as a result of his wartime experiences.
Laughton's first Hollywood film was The Old Dark House (1932) with Boris Karloff, in which he played a bluff Yorkshire businessman marooned in a creepy Welsh manor during a storm.
Although he wasn’t the first British actor to win an Oscar (that was George Arliss), Laughton was the first actor to win an Oscar for a British made film, The Private Life of Henry VIII, in 1933. He remains, as of 2019, the only actor to win an Academy Award for playing Henry VIII.
In 1936, he appeared at the Comédie-Française in Paris as Sganarelle in Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui. He was the first English actor to appear at that theatre, where he performed the role in French and received an ovation.
He was also a director. While he only directed one film, The Night of the Hunter in 1955, he directed many stage productions.
He met his wife, Elsa Lancaster, when they appeared together in a play in 1927. They married two years later and stayed together until he died. There seems to be much speculation as to why they remained child free. He was gay; she couldn’t have children because of an earlier botched abortion; or (shock horror) they simply didn’t want any.
Laughton died of cancer in 1962, at the age of 63.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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