Lanchester, Elsa (1902–1986)

British-born actress whose Bride of Frankenstein has become a cult classic. Born on October 28, 1902, in Lewisham, England; died in December 1986; only daughter and one of two children of Edith Lanchester and James Sullivan (a laborer); attended Mr. Kettle's School, London; married Charles Laughton (an actor), in 1929 (died 1962); no children.

Selected filmography:

One of the Best (UK, 1927); The Constant Nymph (UK, 1928); Day Dreams (short, UK, 1929); Comets (UK, 1930); The Love Habit (UK, 1930); The Stronger Sex (UK, 1931); Potiphar's Wife (UK, 1931); The Officers' Mess (UK, 1931); The Private Life of Henry VIII (UK, 1933); The Bride of Frankenstein (1935); Ladies in Retirement (1941); Son of Fury (1942); Tales of Manhattan (1942); Forever and a Day (1943); Thumbs Up (1943); Lassie Come Home (1943); Passport to Adventure (1944); The Spiral Staircase (1946); The Razor's Edge (1946); Northwest Outpost (1947); The Bishop's Wife (1947); The Big Clock (1948); The Secret Garden (1949); Come to the Stable (1949); The Inspector General (1949); Buccaneer's Girl (1950); Mystery Street (1950); The Petty Girl (1950); Frenchie (1951); Dreamboat (1952); Les Misérables (1952); Androcles and the Lion (1953); The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953); Hell's Half Acre (1954); Three-Ring Circus (1955); The Glass Slipper (1955); Witness for the Prosecution (1958); Bell Book and Candle (1958); Honeymoon Hotel (1964); Mary Poppins (1964); Pajama Party (1964); That Darn Cat (1965); Easy Come, Easy Go (1967); Blackbeard's Ghost (1968); Rascal (1969); Me, Natalie (1969); Willard (1971); Terror in the Wax Museum (1973); Arnold (1973); Murder by Death (1976); Die Laughing (1980).

Those who remember the British-born actress Elsa Lanchester tend to envision her as the macabre bride in the 1935 horror film The Bride of Frankenstein, a portrayal that Carlos Clarens referred to as "a delicate suggestion of both the wedding bed and the grave." Lanchester actually played dual roles in the film, also appearing as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , in the opening scenes. The demure and innocent portrayal of Shelley made her transformation into the female monster even more dramatic. While "The Bride" became Lanchester's trademark role, she played a wide range of character parts on both the stage and screen, sometimes teaming with her husband, actor Charles Laughton. For ten years, Lanchester appeared with a small theater ensemble in Hollywood, performing off-beat songs and comic sketches that she eventually turned into several concert shows.

Elsa Lanchester, distinguished by an elfin face and a mop of frizzy copper-colored hair, was the daughter of Edith Lanchester and James Sullivan, a pair of radical socialists who refused to marry, thus placing the burden of illegitimacy on their two children. Edith and James—or Biddy and Shamus, as they called each other—devoted their lives to social causes, and civil disobedience became the norm for Lanchester, as did an itinerant lifestyle. "My parents moved six times to avoid having me vaccinated because my brother Waldo had 'taken' very badly six years before," Lanchester recalled in her autobiography Elsa Lanchester Herself. Edith, who held several college degrees, also fought to home school her daughter, so Lanchester's formal education was delayed for a year while the battle waged. She finally ended up as the only girl at her brother's school, which was run by the distinguished socialist, Frederick Kettle.

When Lanchester was around 11, Edith began taking classes with Raymond Duncan, Isadora Duncan 's brother, who offered free courses in weaving, spinning, sandal-making, and dance at a local meeting hall. While Edith stitched shoes, Elsa took dance lessons, studying Duncan's own method, "Greek rhythmic gymnastics." As a result of her excellent progress, she was invited, all expenses paid, to attend Isadora's school for talented children in Paris ("To Teach the World to Dance"). "When I joined the school, Isadora was pregnant and I believe having one of her lawsuits with the dancer Loïe Fuller ," Lanchester recalled. "Swathed in draperies, she did most of her teaching lying on a chaise lounge, covered from head to foot, even her face, with the finest veiling of the palest cream color." Unfortunately, all Lanchester learned from Duncan was, in her words, "to run away from or toward an enemy or to become an autumn leaf … or something." When the war threatened, Lanchester went home, and Duncan returned to Russia and "melted into history."

When Kettle closed his school in 1914, Lanchester's formal education came to an end, and she became an assistant to Rose Benton , a Raymond Duncan disciple who lectured on his method while Lanchester demonstrated. In addition, she took private students and taught at a school in Chelsea run by Margaret Morris , who also had a summer school in the Isle of Wight. Eventually, Lanchester established her own children's theater in Soho, where she produced variety shows and adaptations from popular children's stories. When she was 17, she and a small group of friends opened a late-night club, The Cave of Harmony, which was housed in a tiny firetrap of a building which also served as Lanchester's residence. The small company produced cabaret shows and obscure one-act plays that drew the attention of distinguished actors who were anxious to undertake some Pirandello or Chekhov in their off hours. It was here that Lanchester began performing the obscure out-of-print songs that eventually became her specialty, such as "Please Sell No More Drink to My Father" (written as a serious Temperance song) and "The Ratcatcher's Daughter." She also performed in comedy sketches; one skit, with Angela Baddeley , featured two charwomen, Mrs. Bricketts and Mrs. Du Bellamy, who chatted impromptu about interesting events or newspaper stories while hanging wash. Over the four years that the theater was in business, it attracted a number of the famous, including H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, James Whale and Evelyn Waugh, who said he came especially to hear Lanchester sing "My Yiddisher Boy (With His Yoy, Yoy, Yoy)."

It was a patron of the Cave—producer Nigel Playfair—who gave Lanchester her start on the professional stage, casting her in The Insect Play, which also starred Baddeley, John Gielgud, and Claude Rains. Winning rave reviews for her role as The Larva, Lanchester was next cast as the sluttish maid in The Way of the World. She gradually worked her way up to larger roles and finally landed a lead in the revue Riverside Nights, in which she sang and danced her way through four or five of her odd little songs, much to the delight of the critics.

In 1929, Lanchester married Charles Laughton, a portly and insecure young graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, whom she had met two years earlier when they were both cast in the play Mr. Prohack. Two years into the marriage, Laughton told his young bride that he was homosexual, a confession that so shocked Lanchester that she became deaf for about a week. "I suppose I shut my ears off, probably as a reaction to the news I hadn't wanted to hear," she theorized. Although Laughton's disclosure drove a wedge between the couple, the marriage endured for over 30 years, largely due to Lanchester's sense of duty, but also because of the couple's shared interests and genuine affection for each other. There were frequent estrangements, however, through which Lanchester was sustained by close outside relationships that came and went over the years. As she explained in her autobiography, she grew to accept Charles' affairs with other men as part of her life with him. "Perhaps it was unkind of me not to show disapproval. My acceptance may have been more cruel, in a way, and made Charles feel even more guilty about it all. He was a moral man—about everyone but himself. Himself he shocked; he horrified himself…. It made me very sad that Charles should have to feel so guilty about it; that he seemed to need to be so secretive, all the while still wanting to be found out."

Perhaps the greatest bond in their difficult marriage was the theater, which afforded the couple many opportunities to work together both on stage and in film. One of their earlier joint efforts on the stage was Payment Deferred, in which Lanchester played Laughton's daughter. (In the later film version of the play, Lanchester's role went to Maureen O'Sullivan , who had more box-office appeal.) In September 1931, following a run in London, the play was brought to New York with the cast intact, giving the couple their first glimpse of America. When the play closed, they returned to London, only to turn around and sail back to the United States so Laughton could start the movie The Devil and the Deep, which launched his American film career. For some time, Laughton commuted back and forth to London, where he and Lanchester frequently appeared together with the Old Vic. In 1933, the couple made the British film The Private Life of Henry VIII, in which Lanchester played Henry's fifth wife Anne of Cleves to much acclaim. The film netted Laughton an Academy Award and is considered by some to have been the first great English film distributed in the United States.

One of Lanchester's personal triumphs at the Old Vic was the role of Ariel in The Tempest, opposite Laughton as Prospero. She felt it was her most serious and interesting acting experience with her husband, and also the play in which she learned to act rather than perform. Critic Harcourt Williams thought that her highly stylized interpretation took away from the play, but James Agate waxed poetic in his praise. "May I be forgiven for saying that until Miss Elsa Lanchester, the part of Ariel has never been acted?," he began. "She has a radiance that cannot be explained, and by an ingenious unwearying, yet unwearisome movement of the arms suggests kinship with that insect creation which, quivering in the sun, puts to shame the helicopter of human invention." Later, in 1935, Lanchester played perhaps her most controversially received role, Peter Pan, again sharing the stage with Laughton, who was Captain Hook. Lanchester found the character of Peter a bit officious and played him like a little general. In his book A Life in the Theatre, Tyrone Guthrie called Laughton's soft-pedaled Hook the hero of the evening. "It was when Peter Pan came on that little children hid their faces in their mothers' skirts and strong men shook with fear," he noted.

As Laughton's American film career became more established, the couple settled in California, where over the years they owned several houses. They would become American citizens in 1950. For ten years, beginning in 1941, Lanchester was associated with the Turnabout Theater, which was founded by Forman Brown, Harry Burnett, and Roddy Brandon, or the Yale Puppeteers as they came to be known. The unusual enterprise was housed in a converted theater outfitted with two stages, one for puppets and one for actors. The productions consisted of an hour-long puppet show, then—turnabout—a live revue. Lanchester joined the theater in its third week and soon became a regular, performing the songs and routines she had done at the Cave. Soon Forman Brown was adding his own original compositions to Lanchester's repertoire, the first of which, about a cleaning woman, went "If You Can't Get in the Corners (You Might as Well Give Up)." Through the years, Brown composed some 60 songs for Lanchester, who found him to be the perfect collaborator.

While working at the Turnabout in the evening, Lanchester had her days free to pursue her film career, which was well under way. She had made her film debut in 1927, in several two-reel comedies devised by H.G. Wells. She also made her first feature film that year, One of the Best, followed by The Constant Nymph in 1928. In America, Lanchester had a tougher time getting established in film, but she finally found her niche in character roles. She won Oscar nominations for her roles in Come to the Stable (1949), in which she also sang the song "Through a Long and Sleepless Night," and Witness for the Prosecution (1958), in which she was a nurse to the ailing lawyer, played by Laughton.

Lanchester used much of her material from the Turnabout in night-club performances, and also in her concert show, Elsa Lanchester's Private Music Hall, produced by Paul Gregory and musically arranged by Ray Henderson, who became her exclusive accompanist. Lanchester toured colleges and town halls throughout the United States and Canada with the production, covering a total of 22,000 miles by car. Later, in 1961, Laughton directed his wife in another one-woman show, the autobiographical revue Elsa Lanchester—Herself, which opened in New York City on February 4, 1961, during a major snowstorm. "If there's anyone who can make you forget about 17.4 inches of snow, it's Elsa Lanchester," read The New York Times the next morning. "The program notes that the show has been censored by Charles Laughton," it went on. "But his heart wasn't in it. In fact, if this is

Elsa censored, what is Elsa like uncensored?… [E]ven if you have to use dog sleds, skis, or bulldozers, drop in on Elsa. She won't let you down." The show had a ten-week run in New York, followed by three two-week runs at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood.

While Lanchester's show was still in development, Laughton suffered a massive infection as a result of gallbladder surgery and was hospitalized for several weeks. He never regained his vitality. Lanchester remembered seeing him off on his last tour in 1961. "Sometimes you have a sudden flash that you're not going to see someone in health ever again, and I had the feeling—that I was a free woman. That's a terrible thing to say, in a way. But, at that moment, that's how I felt."

While on that tour, Laughton fell in the tub and broke his collar-bone. Subsequent surgery to repair the fracture revealed an advanced case of osteosarcoma (bone cancer). Lanchester spent the next year caring for her husband, who endured agonizing pain but did not know until the end that he was dying from cancer. Following his death in December 1962, Lanchester returned to England, spending time with her aging mother and arranging for the sale of Laughton's extensive art collection. Returning to Hollywood, she received a few offers for movie roles, but "nothing to turn your grapes sour over," as she put it. She credited a stint on the television series "The John Forsythe Show" with connecting her to life again, and she also had two bonus runs of Elsa Lanchester—Herself. She finally did accept some of those mediocre film offers, a few of which were reminiscent (in title only) of The Bride of Frankenstein: Blackbeard's Ghost (1968), Terror in the Wax Museum (1973), and Murder by Death (1976). In 1983, the actress completed a second autobiography, Elsa Lanchester—Herself, a companion to Charles Laughton and I (1937), which first appeared as a series in London's Sunday Express. "I cannot tie up this ending with a pretty pink bow," she wrote. "Getting older is, to put it mildly, gruesome. And, having unloaded the past, memory is of course more localized now, though it seems to be a loyal machine willing to serve if forced. So time is now up to its tricks with me—the Bitch! It's suddenly always Christmas again. Oh, I forgot, it's Father Time!"

sources:

Fowler, Glenn. "Elsa Lanchester, 84, Is Dead; Actress Portrayed Eccentrics," in The New York Times Biographical Service. December 1986, pp. 1447–1448.

Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. NY: Harper-Collins, 1994.

Lanchester, Elsa. Elsa Lanchester—Herself. NY: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts