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Article: A LAUGHTON CLASSIC
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- January 29, 1989
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright (null) The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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There's more than makeup and a hugely deformed back to Charles
Laughton's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1939). Laughton channeled
his misgivings about his own bulky body into the role, making
Quasimodo, Victor Hugo's hunchbacked bell ringer of medieval Paris,
almost too painful to watch. To disarm comment about his build,
which he considered ugly, Laughton once likened himself to a
departing pachyderm. But his masochism cuts the sentimentality in
the hunchback role. Laughton is piercingly memorable as he moons
self-abasingly over Maureen O'Hara's Esmeralda and rocks back and
forth in the belfry of Notre Dame, trying to soothe his pain and
isolation. Only in his depiction of the ...