Charles Laughton

Charles Laughton was a British-American actor of enormous range and presence, known for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and Spartacus (1960), as well as his sole directorial effort, the now-canonical The Night of the Hunter (1955). He was gay in an era when homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain and a social impossibility in Hollywood; he married actress Elsa Lanchester in 1929, and the arrangement endured as one of mutual tolerance — Lanchester later acknowledged she had known he was gay. His homosexuality was extensively documented after his death, and he is now recognized as one of the great closeted gay artists of Hollywood's golden age, his private struggle often read into the intensity and vulnerability of his performances.