1902 (London, England)-1986 (Los Angeles US)
People know Elsa Lanchester as the "Bride of Frankenstein," especially at this time of year, so near Halloween, when there is a lot of screening of classic Universal Monsters films. But Elsa got her start in films in the late 1920's when she herself was in her 20's. She was born Elsa Sullivan Lanchester in the Lewisham area of London on this day into a "Bohemian" family. Her surname was take from her mother, with her middle name being the surname of her father, because her parents formally refused to legally marry. She had one older brother five years her senior who also went into performance, albeit it a puppeteer & marionette company owner: Waldo Sullivan Lancnester. Elsa was schooled in Paris up until the start of World War I under Isadora Duncan. She was then sent off to a domestic boarding school to teach dance; she was only 12 years old at the time. Her desire in life was to become a classical dancer, a dream that was not to be. She instead started her own nightclub act, singing and dancing revivals of Victorian ballads. This would be her gateway into theatrical work. She made her film debut in 1925 in the melodramatic comedy The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, a student film made completely for the fun of it. The film was written by and featured Evelyn Waugh--the writer of Brideshead Revisited and was a friend of Lanchester (and with whom she shared a birthday); though completely an amateur effort, it brought some attention to the participants, Lanchester including. Her first professional film appearance came in 1927 in the T. Hayes Hunter directed One of the Best. She appeared in four films in 1928, in the one major production--The Constant Nymph--she went uncredited, but the other three was rather special. She appeared as "herself"--or rather "Elsa" in three short films written especially for her by H. G. Wells himself. The Tonic, Day-Dreams, and Blue Bottles were all comedy shorts and placed into script form by one of Wells' sons Frank. All of these films were silent, but her last film appearance of the decade was in a DeForest Phono sound film Mr. Smith Wakes Up, another comedy short and released in February of 1929; it was based on a radio play penned by Vivian Tidmarsh. The 1920's were also a decade of other performance successes for Lanchester. For starters, she made several appearances on the serious London stage ("High Theater"); it was in one of these productions that she met future husband Charles Laughton, with whom she had a long and contentious marriage. She also was signed by Columbia to go into the recording studio to cut some records--the first of which was released in 1926. Lanchester passed away at the age of 84 on Boxing Day (December 26) of 1986 in her adopted home town of Los Angeles. She was cremated and her ashed were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
You might know her better as....
