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Fellow actors are apt to give him bad marks in technique, but they are impressed by his ability to immerse himself in a role, study it, think about it, live it. When he played Rembrandt, he read every scrap he could find about the painter, down to details on what kind of brushes artists used in the 17th century. As the domineering father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, he became intolerably high & mighty around his own home. When he acted the murderer in Payment Deferred, he got so morose he nearly had a nervous breakdown. Says Korda of these soul struggles: "What he needs is not a director but a midwife."
It is this passion for living his parts that has led his wife to call Laughton "a gifted amateur." Charles shrugs agreement: "Why not? After all, amateur means lover,* doesn't it? I see no reason why a professional shouldn't love his work as much as a hobbyist loves his."
Proust to Plato. Offstage, the Laughtons live a quietly busy life in a small (for Hollywood), eleven-room house that has little ground of its own but, happily, faces on 50 acres of a neighbor's orchards. Elsa works steadily at her non-paying job with Hollywood's Turnabout Theater (TIME, May 24, 1948), and shuttles between nightclub engagements in Manhattan and Los Angeles. Charles has rearranged their living room into a studio where he trains the dedicated and largely unknown young actors of the Charles Laughton Players. When he goes to bed, he surrounds himself with books (from Proust to Plato) and samples them as a dowager might a box of chocolates. When a friend chided him for being self-consciously highbrow, Laughton replied simply: "You've got to remember that I was brought up in a country pub, that all my people were hotelkeepers, and that I'm just coming into the world of culture."
Laughton is diffident with strangers, impatient with fools, and warmly loyal to his friends. Agnes Moorehead describes him as "a big bear with a big, pink, plush heart." His passion for flowers is so great that he will walk miles to see the spring's first crocus. In the gardens of Chapel Hill, N.C., he was so moved by the budding of narcissi and daffodils that he cried. Laughton's personal untidiness upsets some of his friends, but one of them, Actor Arthur Macrae, thinks it more deliberate than careless: "After all, Charles is a funny-looking sort of fellow, and he knows it. There's no sense trying to have an air of an 18th century courtier when you look like that." Laughton, even blunter about his appearance, says flatly: "I have a face like the behind of an elephant."
Tired but Happy. The readings have given a healthy push to Laughton's career. He is signed for at least four new movies (including one with Abbott & Costello), and this week begins a new radio series for the American Medical Association. He has enough reading projects to keep him busy for a decade. He intends to find time for another assault on Shakespeare : his great ambition is to do a really bang-up performance of King Lear, but he doesn't yet feel ready for the part. Tentatively scheduled for this fall is another reading tour based on James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times.