Silver Screen Standards: Elsa Lanchester
Thanks to her role as the nameless title character in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Elsa Lanchester has a special place in horror movie history as the most famous of the female Universal monsters, even though she only appears in the film for a few minutes. Hidden under makeup and wrapped up tight in bandages, Lanchester is as unrecognizable as Boris Karloff is in his own Creature guise, and, like Karloff, Lanchester is a brilliant performer capable of much more nuanced performances than the one for which she is best remembered. We get a better glimpse of Lanchester’s talent in her equally brief role as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, in the scene that opens the picture, but there are so many other films where we can more fully appreciate her unique screen presence. I’m a big fan of character actresses, and Elsa Lanchester is truly one of the greatest. She brings interest and charm to even the smallest supporting role, and, with a film career that spanned from the 1920s to 1980, there are plenty of performances to savor.
Elsa Lanchester was born in London in 1902 to a family who lived outside the social norms of the time. She started training in dance as a child and moved to theater after World War I. Lanchester acted, sang, performed cabaret, and evolved into a serious stage actress, with her marriage in 1929 to fellow actor Charles Laughton creating a powerhouse duo who would appear together on stage and screen many times. The couple became US citizens in 1950 but continued to work in the UK as well as Hollywood. Although Lanchester published a book about her life with Laughton in 1938 and an autobiography in 1983, questions still remain about the true nature of their marriage and their lack of children, but the pair remained together until Laughton’s death in 1962. Lanchester herself died in Los Angeles in 1986 at the age of 84. Although for decades it was believed that Lanchester’s cremated remains had been scattered in the Pacific Ocean, in 2025 she was discovered to be interred at Valhalla Memorial Park in Los Angeles, and a celebration of her life took place at the cemetery on October 28, 2025, to mark her 123rd birthday and the unveiling of a new grave marker.
Lanchester appears in several movies with Laughton, and those pairings are a perfect place to start an exploration of her greatest roles. The two share some of the lightest moments in the 1933 biopic, The Private Life of Henry VIII, with Laughton as the demanding monarch and Lanchester as Anne of Cleves, the one wife smart enough to extricate herself from his lethal pursuit of a male heir. In The Big Clock (1948), Lanchester brings clever comic relief to a tense noir thriller as a quirky artist, while Laughton plays the villain opposite Ray Milland’s ensnared hero. For the pairing that gives the two the most screen time together, see Witness for the Prosecution (1957), in which Lanchester plays a nurse who relentlessly pesters Laughton’s ailing barrister even as he tries to get to the bottom of a twisted case of homicide. Both Lanchester and Laughton earned Oscar nominations for their performances in the Agatha Christie classic, she for Best Supporting Actress and he for Best Actor, but neither won. Their other films together include Potiphar’s Wife (1931), Rembrandt (1936), The Beachcomber, also known as Vessel of Wrath (1938), Tales of Manhattan (1942), and Forever and a Day (1943).
While her movies with Laughton are great fun, Lanchester also shines in her solo appearances. Her roles tend to be lively oddballs, often relatives, servants, or other supporting characters who inhabit the lives the of the protagonists. Some of my favorites from this category include The Ghost Goes West (1935), Ladies in Retirement (1941), Lassie Come Home (1942), The Spiral Staircase (1946), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), and Murder by Death (1976). Lanchester has an especially good part in Ladies in Retirement, in which she plays one of Ida Lupino’s two bizarre and difficult sisters. She also gets ample screen time in Bell, Book and Candle as Kim Novak’s aunt and fellow witch, Queenie, a character who helped to inspire the many hilarious female relatives who populate Samantha’s extended family on the classic TV series, Bewitched (1964-1972). Toward the end of her career, Lanchester became a bit of a regular in Disney live action pictures, with small roles in Mary Poppins (1964), That Darn Cat! (1965), Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968), and Rascal (1969), but my favorite of her late films is the wacky Neil Simon comedy, Murder by Death, in which Lanchester plays a parody of Miss Marple in company with other great stars like Alec Guinness, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Peter Falk, and Peter Sellers.
If you want to seek out even more classic Elsa Lanchester movies, try Come to the Stable (1949), for which she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, or Passport to Destiny (1944), in which she actually gets to be the protagonist for once and not just a supporting player. Charles Laughton enjoyed his only win for the Best Actor Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII, with additional nominations for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Witness for the Prosecution, but I particularly love his performances in The Canterville Ghost (1944) and Hobson’s Choice (1954). For a really different movie featuring Lanchester, you might try the 1971 horror hit, Willard, but that depends on how you feel about 70s horror and homicidal rats.
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
