<Archive Obituaries> Elsa Lanchester (December 26th 1986)
Bill Schenley
Laughton, died on December 26. She was 84.
Photos http://elsalanchester.freeservers.com/main2.jpg
http://eric.b.olsen.tripod.com/images/bride1.jpg
FROM: The Times of London (December 29th 1986) ~
She was a person of many talents - singer, dancer, artist and writer
as well as actress - with a leaning towards the comic and eccentric.
Elsa Sullivan (she later took her mother's name, Lanchester) was born
in Lewisham, south London, on October 28, 1902, of socialist
vegetarian parents who were friendly with some of the leading artists
and writers of the day. At the age of eleven she started a classical
dancing club for local children, became an assistant teacher of dance
at the Margaret Morris School in Chelsea, and at sixteen founded the
Children's Theatre, presenting songs, dances and plays. She also
attended the Isadora Duncan dancing school in Paris.
While still in her teens she helped to found a theatre-cum-nightclub
in London called the Cave of Harmony, which put on plays and cabaret;
and it was there that she first blossomed as a singer in her own
one-woman show. She was a lively personality, easily recognizable by
her mop of red hair and Bohemian dress.
From the early 1920s she concentrated on the theatre, making her
professional debut in 1922 and appearing in several plays, classical
as well as contemporary, under the management of Sir Nigel Playfair.
She met Charles Laughton, a young actor from Scarborough, in 1927,
when they were both cast in a stage adaptation of the Arnold Bennett
novel, Mr Prohack. They married two years later. Though
temperamentally they were very different, it proved to be a durable
relationship.
The Laughtons entered films towards the end of the silent era, and
Miss Lanchester appeared in the original version of Margaret Kennedy's
The Constant Nymph. But their first considerable success together was
on the stage in C. S. Forester's Payment Deferred. The production
transferred to New York, and from it Laughton started a film career in
Hollywood. But there was no work there for his wife, who returned to
Britain.
Back in London, however, she met the Hungarian producer, Alexander
Korda, a meeting which led to one of the Laughtons' most celebrated
films, The Private Life of Henry VIII, in 1933.
He took the name part and she, with flaxen wig and a convincing German
accent, was Anne of Cleves. It proved to be one of the British
cinema's most popular offerings to that date, but after it, typically,
the Laughtons returned to the theatre in an Old Vic season under
Tyrone Guthrie.
A second trip to Hollywood proved more fruitful for Miss Lanchester,
who appeared with Nelson Eddy and Jeannette Macdonald in Naughty
Marietta, and achieved a striking personal success in The Bride of
Frankenstein, playing both the bride and Frankenstein's creator, Mary
Shelley.
In 1936 she played opposite her husband in another distinguished Korda
film, Rembrandt: he was the painter and she Hendrikje, the young maid
who married him but died a few weeks later. At Christmas that year she
played Peter Pan at the London Palladium, with Laughton as Captain
Hook.
The following year he formed his own film company, Mayflower
Productions, with the expatriate German, Erich Pommer. Their first
picture, a Somerset Maugham story, Vessel of Wrath, gave Miss
Lanchester a good part as a prim spinster, but she was disappointed to
be passed over in favour of Vivien Leigh for the company's next film,
St Martin's Lane. She took to writing instead, and her
autobiographical book, Charles Laughton and I (1938), had critical and
popular acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.
The eventual failure of Mayflower Productions sent Laughton back to
the United States where, in 1939, Miss Lanchester joined him. Though
they were sensitive to the criticism that they had deserted Britain at
a time of crisis, they settled in California and later, in 1950,
became American citizens.
In 1941 she began a long association with the Turnabout Theatre in Los
Angeles, where she presented a series of one-woman shows. She also
took character parts in a number of films.
Nine years later she and Laughton appeared in Billy Wilder's Witness
for the Prosecution, based on a play by Agatha Christie, and both were
nominated for Oscars - he for his performance as a barrister defending
a man on a murder charge, and she as his nurse. In 1958 they returned
to the London stage, in Jane Arden's play, The Party.
After Laughton's death in 1962, Miss Lanchester continued to be active
in films and could enliven the most mediocre production. She was
equally at home in Walt Disney pictures like Mary Poppins and
Bluebeard's Castle, and in horror, where one of her best later roles
was the domineering mother in Willard (1971).
She was a private person, preferring the company of flowers in her
garden. A second book of reminiscences, Elsa Lanchester Herself,
appeared in 1983.
There were no children of the Laughtons' marriage.
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Photo: http://www.cultsirens.com/lanchester/lanchester04.jpg
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Widow Of Charles Laughton Had Many Talents;
Actress Elsa Lanchester Dies At 84
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (December 27th 1986) ~
By Staff Writers
Actress Elsa Lanchester, a red-haired imp who failed to make it as a
danseuse but succeeded in delighting audiences for 60 years with her
bawdy cabaret songs and stage and film performances, died Friday at
the Motion Picture and Television Hospital. She was 84 and her death
was attributed to bronchial pneumonia.
The London-born entertainer had been in the Woodland Hills hospital
since Dec. 17, after suffering a series of strokes. She had been
comatose at home for several years before being admitted to the
hospital.
The widow of Academy Award-winning actor Charles Laughton, she herself
had been nominated for Oscars as best-supporting actress in "Come to
the Stable" in 1949 and "Witness for the Prosecution" in 1957.
Array of Talents
She was so versatile she could horrify moviegoers as "The Bride of
Frankenstein" (1935), enthrall drama devotees with a Shakespeare or
Chekhov stage role and double-up cabaret patrons with her
song-and-dance depiction of "Lola," the naughty Spanish senorita.
Buffing her undulating hips with a shawl, Miss Lanchester would dance
a fandango while relating in song how "somebody broke Lola's
saucepan." Her audiences in such local theaters as the Turnabout on La
Cienega Boulevard and the Ivar in Hollywood howled their appreciation.
Despite the acclaim Lanchester won for scores of movie and stage
roles, her first love remained performing in music halls and cabarets.
She gave more than 3,200 performances in the Turnabout alone in the
1940s and 1950s.
She boasted a repertoire of 50 or more British Victorian music-hall
songs and comedy numbers especially tailored for her unique style by
Forman Brown and other writer friends. She wailed them in Cockney.
"I always make my entrances at the Turnabout," she once said, "looking
as plain, even unattractive, as possible; nothing fancy or
overdressed, no airs to make people say, 'Oh, look at her! Just
because she's the wife of a star!'
Change in Costumes
"Later, I work in the prettier costumes and the flossier, more
sophisticated songs, like 'When a Lady Has a Piazza.' By then
everybody is in the spirit of the thing and willing to accept me, I
hope, as myself."
"When a Lady Has a Piazza" was her trademark number.
Miss Lanchester was born Elizabeth Sullivan in Lewisham, London, Oct.
28, 1902, and as a girl studied for three months at the famed Isadora
Duncan's School of Dance in Paris. But she had to return home when
World War I broke out.
She never achieved her girlhood ambition of dazzling lovers of the
classical dance with graceful movements "in a mist of gauze or
chiffon."
Instead, after teaching dance to children for several years, Miss
Lanchester started collecting old music-hall songs while operating the
Cave of Harmony cabaret in London in the 1920s.
Famous Friends
It was in this celebrated club that she entertained such friends and
patrons as Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood and Osbert Sitwell with
songs like "He Didn't Oughter," "The Ratcatcher's Daughter" and "Won't
You Buy My Sweet Blooming Lavender?"
At the club, too, Lanchester claimed, she originated the costume of
top hat, ballet tights and high heels later used by Marlene Dietrich.
In the club's midnight show, she also presented dramatic readings,
exotic dances and one-act plays. Aldous Huxley was so fascinated with
the place that he featured it in his novel "Antic Hay."
Whenever the American-born Lady Astor visited the club, she always
asked Miss Lanchester to sing one of her ladyship's favorite
temperance songs, "Please Sell No More Drink to My Father." And Miss
Lanchester would obligingly screech:
Please, sir, will you listen a moment?
I've something important to say.
My mother has sent you a message,
Receive it in kindness, I pray.
'Tis my father, poor father, I'm speaking;
You know him, he's called Ragged Gore.
But we love him and hope we may save him,
If you promise to sell him no more.
Then, looking pitiful with a spit curl on her forehead and her hands
raised in supplication, Lanchester would blast the chorus:
Please sell no more drink to my father;
It makes him so strange and so wild.
Heed the prayer of my heart-broken mother,
And pity the poor drunkard's child!
Her friend Waugh, who became one of Britain's finest writers,
mentioned in his posthumously published "Diaries" a 1924 garret party
he attended with her and her "set" of "pansies, prostitutes and
journalists and struggling actors all quite drunk and in patches
lusty."
Miss Lanchester had her first roles on the legitimate stage at this
time, too -- in "Thirty Minutes in a Street" in 1922 and in Congreve's
"The Way of the World" in 1924.
It was also in 1924 that Miss Lanchester appeared with Waugh in a
movie called "The Scarlet Woman." It was a farce about a "popish plot"
to forcibly convert England to Roman Catholicism. (Waugh himself
became a Catholic six years later.)
Private Showings
Miss Lanchester appeared as a seductress in the film, which was shown
a few times privately at Oxford University but never publicly. The
film became a legend in Britain and the University of Texas now has
one of only three existing prints.
Seemingly a big break came for the actress-singer in 1926, when she
was hired to do a comic specialty number in the Midnight Follies at
London's Metropole. But disaster struck when a member of the British
royal family walked out as she was singing "Please Sell No More Drink
to My Father." She was fired.
She shrugged off the matter and said later she should have used
another song from her repertoire -- "I Danced With a Man Who Danced
With a Girl Who Danced With the Prince of Wales."
However, Miss Lanchester got many other parts in many reviews. After
appearing in a stage show, she would have to change costume in a
taxicab while en route to the Cave of Harmony for the midnight show.
Role With Laughton
In 1927, she got a role opposite Charles Laughton in Arnold Bennett's
play, "Mr. Prohack." They were married in 1929 after Miss Lanchester
closed her Cave of Harmony cabaret. Without a liquor license, the club
had never made much of a profit.
A year later Laughton was involved in a London police case involving a
young man. Friends said she had no idea that her husband entertained
homosexual predilections.
"Elsa could have burst into tears, collapsed or struck Charles,"
Charles Higham wrote in his "Charles Laughton: An Intimate Biography,"
which was published in 1976 with Miss Lanchester's cooperation.
"But instead, her compassion fighting her despair, she simply said all
she could in the circumstances: 'It's perfectly all right. It doesn't
matter. I understand.' "
They remained married for 32 years.
In 1928 Miss Lanchester had made her official movie debut in the
silent British version of "The Constant Nymph."
Nothing but Praise
When Laughton was cast in the title role in Alexander Korda's "The
Private Life of Henry VIII," Miss Lanchester got to play the role of
one of Henry's wives, Anne of Cleves. This British movie earned
Laughton the 1933 Academy Award, and Miss Lanchester, in her words,
"paeans of praise, but few offers."
Laughton had begun working in Hollywood in 1931, but it was not until
1935, after Miss Lanchester and her husband had done a number of plays
for the Old Vic-Sadler's Wells Company in London, that she got small
character roles in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's "David Copperfield" and
"Naughty Marietta."
Later in 1935, however, she came into her own as a movie actress when
MGM lent her to Universal to star with Boris Karloff in "The Bride of
Frankenstein."
Miss Lanchester wrote in her 1938 autobiography, "Charles Laughton and
I," that she played "two very good parts" in this horror classic.
"In one role I was the female monster with a terrifying, sculptural
sort of makeup, in the other I was Mary Shelley (the author of the
"Frankenstein" novel) who was sweet and docile," she wrote.
Basis of Complaint
But Miss Lanchester complained about the three hours of work it took
to make up her face for the female monster.
"My hair stiffened into a Topsy-like mop and was to stick out backward
on a little cage," she said. "I was then bound in yards and yards of
bandage, all most carefully done by a nurse."
Although she made six successful movies with Laughton, Miss Lanchester
said in a 1958 interview that she and her husband never considered
themselves an acting "team."
"We had separate acting careers when we first met, and separate we
have kept them ever since," she said. They appeared in the same movie
or play "only when they happened to have roles that were right for
both of us," she added.
The movies in which they appeared together were the Henry VIII film,
"Rembrandt" (1937), "The Beachcomber" (1937), "Tales of Manhattan"
(1942), "The Big Clock" (1947) and "Witness for the Prosecution."
Other of her better-known roles were in "The Ghost Goes West" (1936),
"The Spiral Staircase" (1945), "The Inspector General" (1949),
"Androcles and the Lion" (1953), "Bell, Book and Candle" (1957), "Mary
Poppins" (1964), "Willard" (1971) and "Murder by Death" (1976).
Death of Husband
In 1962 Laughton lay dying of bone cancer in a hospital. The cancer
had reduced the rotund actor's weight to 90 pounds and he had called
for a Catholic priest to make his peace.
When Miss Lanchester visited her stricken husband each day, she asked
photographers not to take her picture.
"Charles is so cheerful," she explained. "And if a picture was taken,
I would have to look sad and Charles wouldn't like that. And I don't
feel like looking jolly."
Laughton died on Dec. 15, 1962, at age 63.
In 1976, after Higham's biography of Laughton had come out, a reporter
asked Miss Lanchester why she had allowed the author to disclose that
Laughton had led a secret homosexual life.
"Because times have changed, and such things can be discussed more
openly than they were before," she said. "And because it might help
people who are faced with the same kind of problem and must deal with
the terrible guilt that Charles felt most of his life."
Miss Lanchester said their common work and the old home and garden
they shared in Hollywood kept them together for more than 30 years.
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Photos: http://www.thegoldenyears.org/lanchest.jpg
http://www.dacre.org/stills/webk/Kar1350.jpg (w/Boris)
http://members.fortunecity.com/johnrobinson2/scansl/lanchester/lanchester_elsa.jpg
Elsa Lanchester in art:
http://www.gawkagogo.com/lilelsalanchester.jpeg
http://www.nurple.com/modelkits/images/Bride-of-Frankenstein.jpg
http://thegalleryofmonstertoys.com/90swing/sideshow12inchbridefrank.jpg