The Theater: The Happy Ham

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Whose Movie? Laughton reached Broadway in Payment Deferred (1931), a grim little drama that won more critical praise than public favor. He followed it with a flop, The Fatal Alibi, but by that time he had caught the eye of Hollywood scouts, and was signed to make The'Devil and the Deep for Paramount. In a crowded Hollywood restaurant, the Laughtons were set upon by Tallulah Bankhead, who roared: "Dahling! I hear you're going to be in my movie!" There were other slights. When the Hollywood eye first lit on Laughton, the Hollywood voice said: "Who's the fat man?" Elsa, even more of an unknown than her husband, spent her time examining what she called the "late Marzipan" architecture of Southern California.

But Laughton in The Devil and the Deep made an impression—even on Hollywood. He was offered the role of Nero in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, and followed with star parts in If I Had a Million, Island of Lost Souls, and the movie version of Payment Deferred (Elsa's role in it was given to Maureen O'Sullivan, and dejected Elsa went back to England; she returned later and has been outstanding in numerous character parts, notably in Come to the Stable and The Big Clock). In the next decade Laughton became the movies' top character actor in such box-office smashes as The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Ruggles of Red Gap, Les Misérables, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

At the very height of his movie career, Laughton abandoned the screen for six months to act with the small, serious-minded Old Vic company in London for £20 a week. This disinterested gesture produced an artistic failure that still rankles, for though Laughton threw himself passionately into the role of Macbeth, he admits now that he "stank it up." Flora Robson, who played Lady Macbeth, thinks he had all the intensity needed for Shakespeare, but no feeling for the poetry: "He just rolled it out like a steamroller."

Laughton has figured out this failure by now: "I was not told about the iambic pentameter and I tried to make sense of Shakespeare and that will not do. What you do is to listen to Shakespeare and obey his rules, one of his rules is the iambic pentameter, and if you are lucky and have an ear Shakespeare will make sense of you."

But if Shakespeare eluded him, Hollywood did not. The Laughtons became thoroughly acclimated to California, and planned to become U.S. citizens (a goal they reached in 1950). Then came World War II, and the Battle of Britain. They hurried to a British consulate to ask how they could help, and were told to stay where they were. In 1940 their London flat was bombed out. Both feel, uneasily, that the British public has never quite forgiven them for sitting out the war in the U.S.