Lon Chaney, Sr.

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Lon Chaney (April 1 1883 – August 26 1930), nicknamed "The Man of a Thousand Faces," was an American actor during the age of silent films. He was one of the most versatile and powerful character actors of the early cinema. He is best remembered for his characterizations of tortured, often grotesque and afflicted characters, and his groundbreaking artistry with film makeup.

Biography

Lon Chaney was born Leonidas Frank Chaney in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Frank H. Chaney and Emma Alice Kennedy; his father had mostly English and some French ancestry, and his mother was of Irish descent.[1] Both of Chaney's parents were deaf, and as a child of deaf adults Chaney was skilled in pantomime. He entered a stage career in 1902. In years following, Chaney traveled with popular Vaudeville and theatrical acts. In 1905, he met and married singer Cleva Creighton and in 1906, their first child and only son, Creighton Chaney (aka Lon Chaney Jr.) was born. The Chaneys continued touring, and settled in California in 1910.

Relationship troubles between Lon and Cleva became apparent and in April of 1913, she went to the Majestic Theater in downtown Los Angeles, where Lon was managing the Kolb and Dill show, and attempted to commit suicide by swallowing Bichloride of Mercury. The attempt failed, and it ruined her singing career, but the scandal of the event and ensuing divorce forced Chaney out of the theater and into film, to which he had worked as bit parts as far back as 1912.

The time spent there is not clear-cut, but between the years 1912 and 1917, Chaney worked under contract for Universal Studios doing bit or character parts and during this time, Chaney befriended the husband-wife director team of Joseph DeGrasse and Ida May Parke, who both gave him substantial parts in their pictures.

It was also during this time that Chaney befriended William Dudley Pelley, who would later go on to form the Silver Legion, an American Nazi organization. Pelley wrote sixteen screenplays while in Hollywood, two of which Chaney would star in.

Also during this time, Lon remarried one of his former colleagues in the Kolb and Dill company tour, a chorus girl named Hazel Hastings. Little is known about Hazel, but it is known that while Lon lived, they were a devoted and loving couple. Upon their marriage, they gained custody of ten year-old Creighton, who had resided in homes and boarding schools since Lon's divorce from his mother in 1913.

By 1917 Chaney had become a substantial actor within the studio, but his salary did not support this. When asking for a raise, he was told by studio executive William Sistrom that, "you'll never be worth more than one hundred dollars a week."

Leaving the studio, Chaney struggled for the first year as a character actor. It was not until 1918, when he was chosen to play a substantial part in William S. Hart's picture, Riddle Gawne, that his talents as a character actor were recognized by the industry.

But it was not until 1919 that Chaney made a breakthrough performance as "The Frog" in George Loane Tucker's The Miracle Man. The film not only displayed Chaney's skills as an actor, but also as a master of makeup. Critical praise and a gross of over $2 million put Chaney on the map as America's foremost character actor.

Chaney is chiefly remembered as a pioneer in such horror films as (the silent versions of) The Hunchback of Notre Dame and most notably The Phantom of the Opera. His ability to transform himself using self-invented make-up techniques earned him the nickname of "Man of a Thousand Faces." Chaney himself, in an autobiographical article published in Movie magazine in 1925 that afforded one of the few public glimpses into his private and work lives, called his specialty "extreme characterization."

He even exhibited this adaptability in more conventional crime and adventure films, such as The Penalty, where he appeared as an amputated gangster. He also appeared in several films by director Tod Browning, often playing disguised or mutilated characters (or both), including carnival knife thrower Alonzo the Armless in The Unknown (1927) with Joan Crawford. In 1927 Chaney starred alongside Conrad Nagel, Marceline Day, Henry B. Walthall and Polly Moran in the now lost Tod Browning directed horror classic London After Midnight, quite possibly the most famous and talked about lost film ever. His last film was a remake with sound of his silent classic The Unholy Three (1930), his only "talkie" and the only film in which he could showcase his powerful voice. For this film Chaney signed a sworn statement, to the effect that five of the key voices in the film (the ventriloquist, old woman, parrot, dummy, and girl) were in fact his own.

Although Chaney created, in Quasimodo, the bell ringer of Notre Dame, and Erik, the "phantom" of the Paris Opera House, two of the most grotesquely deformed characters in the history of film, his portrayals deliberately sought to elicit a degree of sympathy and pathos among those viewers not overwhelmingly terrified, or repulsed, by their disfigurement. These were "monsters" created by a cruel hand of fate and shunned and hated by everyday people.

"I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice," Chaney wrote in Movie magazine. "The dwarfed, mis-shapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals. Most of my roles since The Hunchback, such as The Phantom of the Opera, He Who Gets Slapped, The Unholy Three, etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are the stories which I wish to do."

"He was someone who acted out our psyches. He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen," the writer Ray Bradbury once explained. "The history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that's grotesque, that the world will turn away from."

Lon Chaney's talents extended far beyond the horror genre, and stage makeup. In addition to being an actor and pioneer of many stage makeup techniques, he was also a highly skilled dancer, singer, and comedian. In fact, many people who didn't know Chaney were surprised by his rich baritone voice and his sharp comedic skills.

Chaney and his second wife Hazel led highly discrete private life, and remained distant from the Hollywood social scene. Chaney also performed mininal promotional work for his films and MGM studios, purposefully fostering a mysterious image.

In the final five years of his film career (1925-1930), Chaney worked exclusively under contract to MGM, and gave some of his most memorable performances. His portrayal of a tough-as-nails marine drill seargant in Tell it To the Marines 1926, one of his favorite films, gained him the deep affection of the US Marine Corps, who made him their first honorary member from the motion picture industry.

During the filming of Thunder in the winter of 1929, Chaney developed pneumonia. His condition gradually worsened, and seven weeks after the release of the remake of The Unholy Three, he died of a throat hemorrhage resulting from throat cancer. His death was deeply mourned by his family, the film industry and by his fans. He was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California. For unknown reasons, his crypt has remained unmarked.

In 1957 he was the subject of a biopic titled Man of a Thousand Faces, Chaney was portrayed by James Cagney.

Legacy

Lon Chaney has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1994, he was honored by having his image, designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, placed on a United States postage stamp.

The stage theatre at the Colorado Springs Civic Auditorium is named after Lon Sr.

Chaney built an impressive stone cabin in the remote wildneress of the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Big Pine, California, as a retreat. The cabin (designed by architect Paul Williams) still stands, and is preserved by the Inyo National Forest Service.

Chaney's son, Lon Chaney, Jr., was also known for his acting in horror movies, especially The Wolf Man. The Chaneys appeared on US postage stamps as their signature characters of the Phantom of the Opera and the Wolf Man, with the set rounded out by Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and The Mummy.

He, along with his son, is mentioned in the Warren Zevon song Werewolves of London.

Filmography

References

• Blake, Michael (1990). Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces. New York: Vestal Press. ISBN 1-879511-09-6. 

See also

• Haunted Hollywood

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