Elsa Lanchester
Elsa Lanchester
Lanchester was born in Lewisham, London, England. Her parents, James Sullivan and Edith Lanchester, were considered Bohemian, and refused to legalize their union in any conventional way to satisfy the era’s conservative society. They were both socialists according to Lanchester in a 1972 Dick Cavett interview. Edith’s parents even successfully sent her to an asylum for a while, as she refused to wed James even if she wanted to live with him. An elder brother, Waldo (b. 1898), completed the family.
Elsa Lanchester
As a child, Elsa studied dance in Paris under Isadora Duncan, whom she disliked. When the school was discontinued due to the start of First World War she returned to England. At that point (she was about twelve years of age) she considered herself capable of teaching dancing in the Isadora Duncan style (despite her own scathing remarks about her former teacher’s style) and, very enterprisingly, started to give classes to children in her South London neighbourhood, through which she earned some welcome extra income for her household.
At about this time, after the First World War, Elsa started the Children’s Theatre and later the Cave of Harmony, a nightclub at which modern plays and cabaret turns were performed. She revived old Victorian songs and ballads, many of which she retained for her performances in another revue entitled Riverside Nights. Elsa became sufficiently famous for Columbia to invite her into the recording studio to make 78rpm discs of four of the numbers she sang in these revues: Please sell no more drink to my father and He didn’t oughter were on one disc (recorded in 1926) and Don’t tell my mother I’m living in sin and The Ladies Bar was on the other (recorded 1930).
Elsa Lanchester
Her cabaret and nightclub appearances appearances led to more serious stage work and it was in a play by Arnold Bennett called Mr. Prohack (1927) that Elsa first met another member of the cast, a rising actor called Charles Laughton. They were married two years later and continued to act together from time to time, both on stage and screen. She played his daughter in the stage play Payment Deferred (1931) though not in the subsequent Hollywood film version. Elsa Lanchester and Laughton also appeared in the Old Vic Season of 1933-34, playing Shakespeare, Chekov and Wilde, and in 1936 she was Peter Pan to Laughton’s Captain Hook in J. M. Barrie’s play at the London Palladium.