The Film World

Radio Record, Volume IX, Issue 14, 11 October 1935, Page 22

The Film World

_ CHARLES LAUGHTON’S Prrurrary GLAND

Secret Of His Success

CREDIT the pituitary! That trouble some gland, responsible for so many of the freaks of sideshows and cireuses, has largely redeemed itself hy supplying Hollywood with the umorphous, the protean, the chameleonluke character, Charles Laughton. According to medical men, Laughton owes to the pituitary gland his unusual physical appearance, his ability tc change shape like any cloud, his body’s quick adjustment to the role of clerk or monarch, Gaspar Milquetoast or Nero. His amazingly heavy, slum: berous head-the pituitary gland has been at work there also, The nostrils can shiver like a sensitive rabbit’s, or expand like a monster’s, The eyes, glazed and unseeing, or burning with hidden desire, transform at will to fit the part. Nature has been unusually generous; Laughton was born to ‘play character roles, In fact, from the very beginning it was the pituitary gland that guided Laughton along his -predestined path. His sluggishness, his .aversion for

sports, traced again to the self-same giand, led him, in school, to take a dramatic course. It excused him from Rugby. It saved him from putting his heart into the hotel business, It singled him out of the crowd. It led him to triumph in his earliest roles,

The pituitary was responsible for Laughton’s startling resemblance to the’ Tudor monarch in "rhe Private Lif¢

of Henry VIII." It ‘enabled his jowls to distend, his chest to swell, his shoulders to broaden, his face to adapt itself to the coarse joviality of the 16th century, 1t permitted this same hody completely to transform itself into the shape of the household tyrant of "The Barretts of Wimpole Street." Now the shoulders drooped, became round and narrow, the whole framework sagged. All the strength, all the purpose, all the malice, now became centred in the gleaming, terrifying eyes. As Nero, Laughton was a flabby clown, In his latest role, as the detective J avert in the sereen version of Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables," Laughtop appears ag the very incarnation éf brute power and relentlessness,