For some reason, Laughton's eyes look swollen to me. I can see he's wearing film makeup with drawn in brows and the rest, but did he also use some sort of prosthesis to make his eyes smaller? He looks very different from his every day appearance in thirties photos I've seen.
Anybody out there have information? Thank you!
His appearance looked as I have remembered him to look. His eyes were a little bit bulging.
shareLaughton loved to play around with make-up. With the obvious exception of his Quasimodo, many of his facial hairs and make-ups were devised and executed by Laughton himself. It was all part of his building of character. For Henry he seems to have based it, obviously, on the portraits of Henry VIII - who had rather a pretty boy look in some ways. Those sculpted, fairly thin eye-brows make a world of difference to a face like Henry's and Laughton's too for that matter (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/film/Best%20British%20Films/HenryVIII-xlarge.jpg). It gave his entire eye and brow quite a different look. Compare it to his look in White Woman (http://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/9312148/1118full-white-woman-photo.jpg) made the same year, and you notice how drastically subtle alterations to his eye-brows can change his whole face. The wacky moustache helps a lot, too, and lends a very certain kind of sleaze to the character there. Equally, the two films made either side of these two - Island Of Lost Souls & The Barretts Of Wimpole Street - contain entirely different sets of facial hair, once again specifically appropriate, deeply rooted you might say, in his interpretive characterization.
In Simon Callow's book he asserts that Charles did most of this himself over the years - which shows remarkable skill on his part. In terms of both the inner and outer world of character, Laughton is an artisan of considerable virtuosity. At his best, he appears entirely natural but is actually firing off a range of loaded, purposeful gestures and cadences, combined with unique ways of moving - replete with verbal and physical ticks of infinite variety and realism. Not many actors can do what he does without becoming reliant on the artifice to do the work for them - like Bette Davis, for example - although she could be very good, too, often-times she simply descends into very conscious chewing of scenery and relying on the effect of the make-up and costuming to compose her characters.
Meryl Streep has, in recent years, become something of a master character actress but I think it took her quite some years to get to that point. Laughton seems to have had it immediately, and in a multifaceted way.