Elsa Lanchester

Elsa Lanchester played the Bride of Frankenstein in a film she is on screen for about four minutes of, and it made her immortal. She was the daughter of unmarried socialists who refused to marry on principle, studied dance with Isadora Duncan in Paris at ten, and ran a bohemian nightclub in Soho called the Cave of Harmony in her twenties, where she sang bawdy Victorian songs and put on plays by Pirandello. She married Charles Laughton in 1929, learned two years later that he was homosexual - from him, after a blackmail incident - and stayed married for thirty-three years until his death. She played Anne of Cleves opposite his Henry VIII, and then in 1935 both the Bride and Mary Shelley in James Whale's film, with the hair, the hiss and the jerking head that are now shorthand for the whole genre. She was nominated for two Academy Awards, worked constantly in character parts into the 1970s, and performed one-woman shows of comic songs for decades. Her two memoirs are unusually candid about the marriage, and the second, written after Laughton died, was thought by some friends to be unkind to him. She left everything to charity. The hiss she gives as the Bride was recorded separately and reversed on the soundtrack. She appeared in Witness for the Prosecution with Laughton and was nominated for it. She lived in Hollywood until she died at eighty-four and had no children. Her father was committed to an asylum by his own family and her mother fought a public campaign to get him out, which was reported in the press at the time.

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