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Bride of the Hunchback: The Authorised Biography of Elsa Lanchester
by MJ Simpson

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Much has been written about Charles Laughton, one of the great screen actors of pre-war Hollywood, and about how his roles as Quasimodo, Captain Bligh and others masked his own insecurity, directly linked to the homosexuality that he concealed. Comparatively little has been written about the other half of that curious, sexless marriage, Elsa Lanchester. Despite living in a marriage of convenience – whose primary purpose was to present a normal front to the journalists and photographers of Hollywood – Elsa Lanchester was clearly devoted to her husband.

Mention her name to people and 99 out of 100 will identify her with the title role in Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale’s 1935 film, considered by many critics as the greatest horror movie ever made. Yet she made more than 60 other pictures from 1927 to 1980, and when she died in 1986 she was one of the last surviving film stars who could claim a career extending back into the silent era.

She was the housekeeper in Mary Poppins and the nanny in Lassie Come Home. She starred alongside Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and David Niven in Murder by Death, faced off against Peter Ustinov in Blackbeard’s Ghost, acted with Laurence Olivier in Potiphar's Wife and partied with Elvis in Easy Come, Easy Go. And she made eleven films with her husband, most memorably as Anne of Cleves to his titular monarch in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, the first British film to achieve both public and critical success in America.

Read about the career and the private life of this fascinating character, penned by MJ Simpson, celebrated author of Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams.