Biography

Lon Chaney

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Born
April 1, 1883 · Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA
Died
August 26, 1930 · Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (throat hemorrhage)
Birth name
Leonidas Frank Chaney
Nicknames
- The Man of a Thousand Faces
- The Master of Horror
Height
5′ 7″ (1.70 m)

Although his parents were deaf, Leonidas Chaney became an actor and also owner of a theatre company (together with his brother John). He made his debut at the movies in 1912, and his filmography is vast. Lon Chaney was especially famous for his horror parts in movies, e.g. Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Due to his consistent pursuit of and success with special make-up effects, he carried the characterization, "the man with the thousand faces." He only filmed one movie with sound: the remake of one of his earlier films The Unholy Three (1930). His son, Lon Chaney Jr., became a famous actor of the horror genre.
- IMDb mini biography by: Volker Boehm

Known as the Man of a Thousand Faces. Master of early screen make-up techniques.
Macabre, menacing characters who nonetheless always have an undercurrent of pathos and melancholy
Extremely expressive performances in silent horror films

A quiet soul by nature, he valued his privacy highly. Granting few interviews and disliking the Hollywood social whirl, he much preferred spending quiet time with his family and a few close friends, often at his cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This avoidance of publicity led to his being unfairly labeled by some as strange and unfriendly. However, those who knew him best always described him as a good, loving husband, father, and friend. Similarly, his co-stars, among them Loretta Young and Joan Crawford, remembered him as being very cooperative and helpful, especially to those performers without much experience.
A popular joke of the era was "Don't step on it; it might be Lon Chaney!".
A child of deaf parents, he became a master of pantomime and understanding people who were born different.
His knowledge of make-up was so vast that he wrote the entry on the subject for an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Were it not for his death, he rather than Bela Lugosi would have been Tod Browning's choice for the starring role in Dracula (1931).

Between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney.
My whole career has been devoted to keeping people from knowing me.
When a makeup is as painful as that which I wore as Blizzard in The Penalty (1920), when I had my legs strapped up and couldn't bear it that way more than 20 minutes at a time - when I have to be a cripple, as in The Miracle Man (1919) or have to keep a certain attitude of body, as I did in Shadows (1922), it sometimes takes a good deal of imagination to forget your physical sufferings. Yet, at that, the subconscious mind has a marvelous way of making you keep the right attitudes and make the right gestures when you are actually acting.
I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice. The dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals. Most of my roles since The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), such as The Phantom of the Opera (1925), He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Unholy Three (1925), etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are the stories which I wish to do.
There's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.