A hard actor to follow
Robert Cushman
CHARLES LAUGHTON: A DIFFICULT ACTOR by Simon Callow
Methuen, £14.95
Iwish I could act as well as Simon Callow writes. This is a wonderfully neat, vivacious and thorough biography, written in a style that is nearly as versatile as it wants to be; Mr Callow cannot always pass quite effortlessly from scholarly historian to green-room joker. But what he has to say in both voices is worth hearing.
Laughton, looking resignedly bewild- ered, gazes at us from the front cover; Callow, looking suavely determined, con- fronts us from the back. The book's subtitle, 'A Difficult Actor', has been cheekily positioned so that it might apply to either of them. Laughton, especially in Hollywood, gained his name for difficulty through the extreme seriousness with which he took his work and himself — and Callow makes it clear that these two subjects were indivisible and, to a large extent, identical. Callow's own maverick reputation derives not, as far as 1 know, from any self-indulgent behaviour on the set but from having written Being an Actor, a witty and opinionated book about his own career, topped off with a manifesto demanding that actor shall speak freely unto audience, without undue interference from the director. My impression is that directors have forgiven him for this, but that critics — who have a vested interest in directors, regarding them as fellow- intellectuals and easy to write about — have not. In many ways, Callow's second book is a continuation of his first: another eloquent exposition of the triumphs and despairs of being an actor, the more eloquent for being undertaken at one remove. 'The starting point of this book', he says, 'was my realisation that I was not, after all, Charles Laughton.' He made this discovery while playing Angelo in On the Spot, a role that had been a great success for Laughton and proved to be a fast flop for Callow. You can read his amused acceptance of this fact between the lines when he comes to discuss Laughton's performance (it ex- hausted him, as well it may' [sic]) and there are one or two other submerged autobiog- raphical links. A chapter on Brecht's Galileo which Laughton translated and played in America must be partly fuelled by Callow's own appearance as the Little Monk in the National production. He writes entertainingly about Micawber — a character that he played and Laughton abandoned. And the memory of On the Spot surely recurs when Callow remarks of Captain Hook, a role in which Laughton followed his own hero Gerald du Maurier, `of all the motives for accepting a part, admiration for what someone else did with it is the most treacherous.'
Callow has long been obsessed with Laughton: he writes in Being an Actor of the derision his enthusiasm aroused in colleagues who regarded his idol as either a ham or a teddy-bear. The latter was pretty much my own estimate of him. So it was a shock to discover in Callow's book just how important a figure Laughton was At drama school they thought him too odd and physically clumsy ever to succeed. But within a few years he was regarded as Britain's best young actor; James Agate was calling him 'great' long before anyone applied the word to Olivier. Olivier serves Callow as a stalking-horse throughout: the great technician opposed to the great explorer of self; the matinee idol who conquered Shakespeare, in opposition to the shambling intellectual who forsook the classics in favour of Hollywood.
And here comes Callow's second revela- tion. He draws a sharp line down the middle of Laughton's career. The first half climaxes with The Hunchback of Notre Dame: 'the last time he risked madness and physical collapse to fashion from his own psyche an image of the human condition.' You may find that a bit overblown; I do myself, though I cannot get out of my mind the sad humility with which his Quasimodo confessed to Esmerelda that, on top of all his other handicaps, he was deaf as well. He seemed to be taking all the sufferings of the world on himself, and not making a fuss about them. Anyway after this, Callow says — and the record supports him Laughton 'put his talent into acting, his genius elsewhere.'
He put it into teaching; into art- collecting; into directing on stage and once (the brilliant Night of the Hunter) on film; into collaborating with Brecht; into public readings, especially from the Bible; and into becoming a personality. It was in these last two roles that I saw him (I wonder if Callow did) on Granada television's up- market variety show Chelsea at Nine in the Fifties. Both star-guest and compere, he was treasurably, monumentally, self- depreciating. He could afford to be; he knew he was the boss.
I never saw him on stage. Neither — with more excuse, since he's a few years youn- ger — did Callow. He displays a relish for theatrical history, writing with acuteness and affection of actors most of his contem- poraries would never have heard of. He is especially good on Laughton's season at the Old Vic; a record, for the most part, of magnificent failure; he could only be great in plays he was better than. And when, 25 years later, he tried again at Stratford, the problems were the same. Callow writes brilliantly, tantalisingly, of the great per- formance that was implicit in his Lear (and which some people actually saw and ex- perienced there) while sadly concluding that the doubters may well have been right.
He has apparently seen every one of Laughton's films, and he emerges as a magnificent movie-buff. He traces every performance with the eye of a critic (some- times a severe one; personally I liked Laughton in Hobson's Choice) but he has the edge in being able to describe the process as well as the results. Some of this must be guesswork — a mixture of gossip, hunch and professional intuition — but it is very persuasive. It's enough to convince you that only actors should be allowed to write about acting. I loved his comment on the supposed nadir of Laughton's film career, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd: no resemblance to Laughton's ear- lier performances as Captains Kidd or Bligh — 'it's more like the performance everyone thought he'd given in those roles.' As he says, Laughton outdid all other actors in handing impersonators three roles in which to memorialise him: Henry VIII, Bligh, Quasimodo. The last two were virtuoso pieces of self-torment, and Callow examines the springs of self- hatred in Laughton himself: in his puritan
provincial upbringing, in his physical limitations, in his failure to come to grips with verse and hence with Shakespeare, in his shame at his homosexuality, in his long marriage – a mixture of mutual support and mutual recrimination – to Elsa Lan- chester.
Callow, doubtless, has his own daemons; but he seems an altogether happier person. He told me once in an interview that the quality he was most interested in por- traying as an actor was innocence – and in this realisation he parted company with Laughton, who on this showing was an artist in guilt. The fruits in Callow's own work can be seen in his most recent, and finest, stage performance, in Kiss of the Spider Woman – a conscious renunciation, perhaps, of the villainy he tried to encom- pass in On the Spot. As his contemporary and apparent rival, Antony Sher, moves Olivier-like further into the classical reper- toire, so Callow seems to edge further away from it. But, like Laughton, he is diversifying, and this book – the best biography of a modern actor I have ever read – bears witness to his range of tastes and interests. He is at home with litera- ture, music, painting and psychology, but it seems to be acting that has revealed them to him, and it is through acting – doing it or writing about it – that he shares them with
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