Laughton and Lanchester

Radio Record, 9 December 1938, Page 37

Laughton and Lanchester

Elsa Lanchester Has Written A Witty, Entertaining Book About Her Famous Husband |

HE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY Viil, the film that started the British film boom and made half a dozen talkie reputations including that of Alexander Korda, was, like many other big movie money-spinners, an accidental hit. It was never intended to make it in the form in which it-emerged from the cutting-room. The original idea was a Charles Laughton-Elsa Lanchester co-starring vehicle about Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Elsa Lanchester reveals the behind-the-scenes story in "Charles Laughton and I," recently published by Faber and Faber.

€¢4 DID play Anne of Cleves,’’ she relates, ‘‘but another wife came in, @Hen another, as it became obvious that what the public knew about Henry was that he had a lot of wives, and that was what they wanted to see." '"Henry," she discloses, was made for £50,000. Laughton had to leave for Hollywood before the film was finished and saw it for the first time in an American cinema. — It’s no longer a secret that most stellar biographies are ‘ghost written," and that some stellar "authors" couldn’t write a posteard, Elsa Lanchester, who has talents for several arts besides acting, is one of the wittiest of women, can proudly and rightfully élaim this book as "all my own work." Much of it was composed on the side of the film sets on*which she has been working recently. Mrs. Laughton, moreover, writes piquantly, intelligently, and, above all, entertainingly, while her portrait of her husband is sufficiently frank for

him to declare, in an introduction, that "for the sake of my personal comfort 1! would tike to have blue-pencilled many of her remarks." ‘Elsa should know Charles better than anyone; she has been married to him for nine years. They first met curing the rehearsals for "Mr. Prohack,"~ the Arnold Bennett. play in which Laughton, in the title. role, "took off" the author himself, even making up to look: like him. Hollywood Ss LANCHESTER comments shrewdly and amusingly on Hollywood. Nobody in the film eapital had.ever heard of Laughton when they first: arrived; people just looked at him and asked: "Who is that fat man?" . So The buildings, they discovered, were "in the Spanish manner, the New England or English farm house style, the Tudor Colonial or what Charlie and I described as the Late Marzipan."

Laughton’s first big Hollywood part was in "The Devil and the Deep" and the English actor, who had always admired Gary Cooper’s work, "studied his camera ease like a lynx." They~became close friends and still are. Soon after Charles Laughton took the role of Nero in "The Sign of the Cross" for Cecil B. de Mille. De Mille visualised the Roman rake as the "menace" in the film, while Laughton thought the figure merely funny and proceeded :to. invest the character with an: amusing preciousness which. he felt would make the orgies more evil. De Mille, right up till the last, never saw his epic or Laughton’s portrayal from this angle.. During the shooting of. the picture, Charles met Mae West, who was busy making her circus film, "!'m No Angel." In the cause of her art she had to be photographed with her head in the mouth of Rudolph, the studio’s tame lion. One day she teetered towards Laughton on the set with that famous walk of hers and said: "Hullo, Charlie! What I couldn’: tell that goddam cat about halitosis." Husbands and Wives fyiss LANCHESTER also has some interesting things to say about husbands and wives working together on the, screen. ‘Quite ordinary, everyday

things in our lives become coloured by the characters we are Dlaying. In "Henry VIII," Henry’s dislike of Anne of Cleves affected our real behaviour. He really thought I was Anne of Cleves and I thought he was somebody whom by various wiles I must try to avoid. , "When Charles was in ‘The Barrets of Wimpole Street’--I did not play in that-he would occasionally come home a little like the domineering father. I reminded him of the actor’s tendency to live his part too realistically and implored him not to bring the character home like a dog bringing a bone into the house. "In ‘Rembrandt’ our private re lationship helped our acting one. Being married made it easier to act two people in sympathy, but when "narles and I came homé at night we often found we had really given to the camera what we should have given to each other in our private lifelike going to bed in a shop window." During the production of "Rembrandt" they met Marfene Dietrich, who was also working at Denham, and found her one of the few undisappointing screen stars off the ‘screen. "One of the greatest moments of my life," Elsa Lanchester declares, "occurred when Marlene

told a Pressman that she would rather act a love scene with Charles than with any other actor in the world. "When Charles read it he threw the newspaper in the air and cheered himself. I was no less delighted by the indirect compliment to me. We had a drink on it." "Charles Laughton and I" is an eminently readable, intimate portrait of a man, a woman and an association which the authoress refers to always and affectionately as "the relationship," as well as 2a penetrating contemporary account of the film and theatre world. If you are interested in life behind the scenes, you will enjoy this book.