Charles Laughton
Charles Laughton (1 July 1899 – 15 December 1962) was an English-American stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and two-time director.
While best known for his historical roles in films, he started his career as a remarkable stage actor. During a time when many serious stage actors despised the motion picture medium, seeing it only as a source of income, Laughton showed keen and serious interest in the pioneering possibilities of film, and later other media, such as radio, recordings, and TV, proving that quality work could be made available to audiences other than theatre-goers. He became an American citizen in 1950.
Laughton soon gave up the stage in preference for a movie career and returned to 
Hollywood where his next film was White Woman (1933) in which he co-starred with Carole Lombard as a cockney river trader in the Malaysian jungle. Then came The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) as Norma Shearer’s malevolent father; Les Misérables (1935) as Javert, the police inspector; Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) as Captain Bligh, one of his most famous screen roles, co-starring with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian; and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) as the very English butler transported to early 1900s America
Laughton directed one film – The Night of the Hunter (1955), starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. This movie is often cited among today’s critics as one of the best movies of the 1950s., and has been selected by the United States National Film Preservation Board for preservation in the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, at the time it was originally released it was a critical and box-office failure, and Laughton never had another chance to direct a film. He did not appear in the film, but worked solely as a director. The documentary Charles Laughton Directs The Night of the Hunter by Robert Gitt (2002) features preserved rushes and outtakes with Laughton’s audible off-camera direction.
Following Laughton’s death in 1962, Laughton’s wife Elsa Lanchester wrote a book alleging that they never had children because Laughton was actually homosexual. Actress Maureen O’Hara, a friend and co-star of Laughton, claimed that Laughton had told her that his biggest regret was never having had children of his own. Laughton also told O’Hara that the reason he and his wife never had children was because of a botched abortion Lanchester had early in her career while performing burlesque. Elsa Lanchester mentioned in her own biography Elsa 
Lanchester Herself having had two abortions in her youth (one of them, a child from Charles), though she doesn’t mention whether this left her incapable of becoming pregnant again or not.
Elsa Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936) and The Big Clock (1948). 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.
In 1950, the couple became American citizens. The cremated remains of Charles Laughton are interred in the Court of Remembrance courtyard, at Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
