Charles Laughton (1^st July 1899 to 15^th December 1962)

The bi-sexual British actor, writer and director was born in this hotel in Scarborough just near the train station.

Among Laughton's biggest film-hits were The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, Jamaica Inn, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Big Clock. Simon Callow wrote a brill book about him. In 1962, he fell in the bath and was taken to a hospital in New York with a collapsed vertebrae. He was then diagnosed with cancer of the gall bladder. He quickly withered away losing that double chin and turning into a bag of bones. In the end he was in so much pain he had to be given injections once an hour.

He died of kidney cancer at 63. He went far - being cremated and the remains interred in a crypt in the Court of Remembrance courtyard at Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

This is the house where he lived on Percy Street, London. Allegedly his wife caught him with a male prostitute on the couch. She threw him and the couch out.

This is the Hollywood house I lived in for the last 25 years of his life.