Richard Jaeckel

Jaeckel died in 1997 after a three year battle with melanoma cancer at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. [[Category:Best Actor Oscar Nominee+Laughton, Charles]]. Ben Edwards on the series Baywatch.
. In his later years, Jaeckel was known to TV audiences as Lt.
. The highlight of Jaeckel's career was in 1971, when he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Sometimes a Great Notion.
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Jaeckel's other films include The Gunfighter, Come Back, Little Sheba, 3:10 to Yuma, Town Without Pity, The Dirty Dozen, Chisum Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Grizzly, Twilight's Last Gleaming, The Dark Cold River, Starman, Black Moon Rising and The Delta Force 2. He is interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. He served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1949, then starred in two of the most remembered war films of 1949, Battleground and Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. Laughton never had another chance to direct his own movies. A casting director audtioned him for a key role in the 1943 film Guadalcanal Diary, Jaeckel won the role and settled into a lengthy career in supporting parts. This movie is often cited among critics as one of the best movies of the 1950s; unfortunately, it was a box-office flop. Jaeckel got his start in the business at the age of 17 while working as a mailboy at 20th Century Fox studios in Hollywood. Laughton had one stint as a director, and the result was the legendary The Night of the Hunter (1955), starring Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish.

A short, but tough guy, he played a variety of characters in his 50 years in movies and television and became one of Hollywood's best known character actors. In 1950, he took American citizenship. Jaeckel was born in Long Beach, New York. Lanchester appeared opposite him in several films, including Rembrandt (1936). Richard Hanley Jaeckel (October 10, 1926 - June 14, 1997) was an American actor. Despite his homosexual inclinations, he had a long and resilient marriage to the British-born American actress, Elsa Lanchester, possibly because she had her own such inclinations according to contemporary gossip. He also received an Academy Award nomination for his role in Witness for the Prosecution (1957).

In 1937 he was to have starred in an ill-fated film version of the book, I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, which was abandoned only part-way into filming. Later films included The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). His association with the director, Alexander Korda, began with The Private Life of Henry VIII (loosely based on the life of King Henry VIII of England), for which Laughton won an Academy Award. Despite not having the looks for a romantic lead, he impressed audiences with his talent and played many classical roles before making his film debut in 1932.

Born in 1899 at Scarborough, Yorkshire, Laughton at first went into the family business, not making his first stage appearance until 1926. Charles Laughton (July 1, 1899 - December 15, 1962) was a British-born American stage and film actor.