Early Life
Elsa Sullivan Lanchester was born in Lewisham, London, England. Her parents, James Sullivan and Edith Lanchester, were considered Bohemian, and refused to legalise their union in any conventional way to satisfy the era's conservative society. They were both socialists, according to Lanchester's 1972 interview with Dick Cavett. Elsa's brother Waldo Lanchester was a puppeteer, with his own marionette company based in Malvern, Worcestershire and later Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire and a friend of George Bernard Shaw
Elsa studied dance in Paris under Isadora Duncan, whom she disliked. When the school was discontinued due to the start of World War I, she returned to Britain. At that point (she was about twelve years of age) she considered herself capable of teaching dancing in the Isadora Duncan style (despite her own scathing remarks about her former teacher's style) and, very enterprisingly, started to give classes to children in her South London district, through which she earned some welcome extra income for her household. At about this time, after the First World War, she started the Children's Theatre, and later the Cave of Harmony, a nightclub at which modern plays and cabaret turns were performed. She revived old Victorian songs and ballads, many of which she retained for her performances in another revue entitled Riverside Nights. She became sufficiently famous for Columbia to invite her into the recording studio to make 78 rpm discs of four of the numbers she sang in these revues: Please sell no more drink to my father and He didn't oughter were on one disc (recorded in 1926) and Don't tell my mother I'm living in sin and The Ladies Bar was on the other (recorded 1930).
Her cabaret and nightclub appearances led to more serious stage work and it was in a play by Arnold Bennett called Mr. Prohack (1927) that Elsa first met another member of the cast, a rising actor named Charles Laughton. They were married two years later and continued to act together from time to time, both on stage and screen. She played his daughter in the stage play Payment Deferred (1931) though not in the subsequent Hollywood film version. Lanchester and Laughton appeared in the Old Vic season of 1933–1934, playing Shakespeare, Chekov and Wilde, and in 1936 she was Peter Pan to Laughton's Captain Hook in J.M. Barrie's play at the London Palladium. Their last stage appearance together was in Jane Arden's The Party (1958) at the New Theatre, London.
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