Charles Laughton: dazzling player of monsters, misfits and kings During his lifetime, from his rise to international fame with The Private Lives of Henry VIII in 1933, Laughton was the most instantly recognisable and for some people the most extraordinary actor of his time. His Henry VIII, his Edward Moulton-Barrett, his Captain Bligh, his Ruggles the butler, his Rembrandt, and, climactically, his Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, were, to use an overworked but in this case precise word, iconic: they entered the world's imagination as distilled images of certain kinds of human experience, in the way the images created by Rembrandt, Van Gogh or Rodin have become part of our collective consciousness. Payment Deferred took him to Broadway and thence to Hollywood, where at first they were unsure what to do with him, although his camp, vicious Nero in The Sign of the Cross certainly made an impression, and his Doctor Moreau in the adaptation of H G Wells's horror story about genetic engineering was a fully fledged Laughton creation, monstrous and pitiful. His breakthrough, however, came in England with The Private Lives of Henry VIII, intended by its director, Alexander Korda, as a risqué story of royal shenanigans, but transformed by Laughton, in his performance and in his influence on the design and screenplay, into a vigorous evocation of the Tudor age. His performance, Holbein come to life, is extravagant, full of contradictions and utterly credible. It won him an Oscar, and led to the astonishing succession of roles, bringing to life a parade of monsters, that made him, by 1939, and his overwhelming Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the king of the acting world. At this point, he seems to have undergone a change in his approach to acting. Despite some striking performances - in John Farrow's The Big Clock, for example - over the next decades he rapidly slipped from his position of eminence. From 1940, he was routinely described by critics as a ham. Witty and charismatic as his performances remained, for the most part (we may make an exception of Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd), it is clear that his creative energies were no longer fully engaged by acting. It had certainly cost him a great deal: often, as with Quasimodo, he was in pain. More importantly, the emotional centre of his life had shifted. He began to come to terms with his homosexuality, which he had furtively pursued since the 1920s, while maintaining the facade of his marriage to Elsa Lanchester. Eventually he started to have sustained relationships with men. He also felt an impulse to teach, which he did in Los Angeles, with a student body including Marilyn Monroe and Shelley Winters. He took to the American university touring circuit, with celebrated readings from the Bible, then with a superb evening called Charles Laughton: the Storyteller; and he returned to the stage as both actor and director. But the greatest achievement of his post-war years was The Night of the Hunter, which, in 1955, he directed with deep imaginative sympathy, transmuting David Grubb's fine novel into quintessentially filmic form, a visual and aural poem, a fable and a thriller, and a celebration of the healing power of love. He led his remarkable team of collaborators with masterly tact and inspiration, revealing himself to be a profoundly gifted film-maker. It was a flop, and it broke his heart. He dallied with a second film, but by then he was already ill, his body worn down by his compulsive smoking, drinking and eating. Cancer of the spine was diagnosed; none the less, he managed to give a poignant King Lear at Stratford, and slyly brilliant cameos in such films as Spartacus and Advise and Consent. At the end of his woefully curtailed life - he was 63 - he was collaborating with another English exile, Christopher Isherwood, high up in his house in Santa Monica, with its view of the Pacific Ocean, on a play about Socrates, another ugly gay man whose life revolved around the idea of beauty. His long journey from Scarborough thus ended on an appropriately exalted note. Simon Callow's 'Charles Laughton: a Difficult Actor" is published by Vintage