Private Life and Death
In 1927, Laughton began a relationship with Elsa Lanchester, at the time a cast mate in a stage play. The two were married in 1929, became American citizens in 1950, and remained together until Laughton's death. Over the years, they appeared together in several films, including Rembrandt (1936), Tales of Manhattan (1942) and The Big Clock (1948). Lanchester portrayed Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's fourth wife, opposite Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII. They both received Academy Award nominations for their performances in Witness for the Prosecution (1957) — Laughton for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress—but neither won. Laughton and Lanchester had no children.
Laughton's bisexuality has been corroborated by several of his contemporaries and is generally accepted by Hollywood historians, However, actress Maureen O'Hara, a friend and co-star of Laughton, claimed that Laughton told her that he and his wife never had children because of a botched abortion which Lanchester had early in her career while performing burlesque and that indeed his biggest regret was never having children of his own. In her own autobiography, Lanchester acknowledged having had two abortions in her youth (one of the pregnancies purportedly by Laughton) although she didn't mention whether this had indeed left her incapable of becoming pregnant again. According to her biographer Charles Higham, the reason she didn't have children was that she didn't want any.
Read more about this topic: Charles Laughton
Famous quotes containing the words private, life and/or death:
“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“... there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“It is better to sit down than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is the best of all.”
—Indian proverb, quoted in Sébastien-roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, vol. 1, no. 155 (1796, trans. 1926)