Biography

Max Linder

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Although all too frequently neglected by fans of silent comedy, Max Linder is in many ways as important a figure as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, not least because he predated (and influenced) them all by several years and was largely responsible for the creation of the classic style of silent slapstick comedy.

Linder started out as an actor in the French theatre, but after making his screen debut in 1905 he quickly became an enormously famous and successful film comedian on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to his character "Max," a top-hatted dandy. By 1912 he was the highest-paid film star in the world, with an unprecedented salary of one million francs. He began to direct films in 1911 and showed equal facility behind the camera, but his career suffered an almost terminal blow when he was drafted into the French army to fight in World War I. He was gassed, and the illness that resulted would blight his career. Although offered a contract in America, recurring ill health meant that his US films had little of the sparkle of his early French work, and a brief attempt to revive his career by making films for the recently-formed United Artists (one of whose founders, of course, was Chaplin) in the early 1920s came to little, although these later films are now regarded as classics. He returned to France and killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925.
- IMDb mini biography by: Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

When Charles Chaplin, who called Linder "my professor," heard that Linder had committed suicide, he closed his studio for a day to show his deep respect.
Widely considered the very first International movie star.
The "mirror routine," made famous in The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), was in fact first performed by Linder in Seven Years Bad Luck (1921).
The first actor in movies to be credited as director in the opening titles.
At an early point in his career, while movies were still silent, Linder discovered the importance of adding the right music to films in order to put an audience in the perfect mood; he frequently sent notebooks with music he considered fitting for his films. The compositions could be amusing, dramatic or romantic.

[on Charles Chaplin] He calls me his teacher, but I have been the happy one, to take lessons from his school.
I've always been an incurable romantic.
[In the early 1910s] When we do a film, I tell my story to my actors; I explain how I want them to behave; we rehearse once; and we shoot.
Yes, I have been on the stage. I started on the stage. But stage comedy and screen comedy are entirely different. One must think more to be successful on the screen. On the stage, one relies on the physical appearance, on the voice, on the wit and repartee of the play, as well as on personality. On the screen, you rely on your own action, on your own ability entirely, to express a thought or emotion. But it was hard for me to get on the stage. My parents were stage folk, but they did not want me to act. At twelve I was sent to a school in Bordeaux, where I was born, to be an artist. I did not like the work.

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