Lon Chaney
The Man of a Thousand Faces. Built the makeup himself, and it cost him.
Lon Chaney is regarded as one of the most versatile actors of the silent cinema, known for playing tortured and often grotesque characters and for makeup work he designed and applied himself.
The self-designed makeup is the part that makes his photographs unusual. Nobody else was both the performer and the effect. Some of the appliances he used were painful enough to limit how long he could work in them.
He made one sound film and died in 1930. A still of Chaney is frequently a still of a character nobody would recognise as him, which is exactly what he intended.
The methods are on record because a cinematographer and a few colleagues described them. For the Phantom in 1925 he built the skull face with a skullcap to raise the forehead, wadding in the cheeks, black paint in the eye sockets, false teeth fitted with prongs, and putty on the nose held up by loops of wire in the nostrils. Charles Van Enger, who photographed it, said the wires made him bleed. The face was kept secret until the premiere on September 6, 1925. Universal reissued the film with a soundtrack in December 1929 and took another million dollars.
The survival rate is bad. Of 157 films, 34 survive complete, 23 in part and 100 are gone entirely, London After Midnight of 1927 among them. He worked with its director, Tod Browning, ten times. His last five years were spent under exclusive contract to MGM, and his last film, The Unholy Three in 1930, was his only talkie; he signed an affidavit that the five voices in it were all his own. He died on August 26, 1930, of a haemorrhage brought on by bronchial cancer. MGM stopped work for two minutes.
Facts on this file are checked against the Wikipedia article Lon Chaney. The wording is ours. Nothing about the photograph is asserted beyond the credit the file itself carries, and that credit is usually a studio rather than a person: stills departments were staff jobs and the photographer's name went unrecorded. Confident attributions in the trade are mostly inherited guesses.
Other prints under this name
About Lon Chaney
Was Lon Chaney's makeup painful
Some of it, and the evidence is specific rather than general. For The Phantom of the Opera in 1925 he pulled up the tip of his nose with wires hidden under putty, and the cinematographer Charles Van Enger said the wires made him bleed. For The Penalty in 1920 he strapped his lower legs back into a leather harness to play a double amputee. Figures for the weight of the Quasimodo hump in 1923, given as anything up to seventy pounds, come from studio publicity and are not documented.
How did Lon Chaney die
Bronchial lung cancer. He was diagnosed in late 1929 after a bout of pneumonia caught during the filming of Thunder the previous winter, when artificial snow was said to have lodged in his throat; the infection is documented, the snow story less firmly. He kept working through The Unholy Three, his only sound film, released in July 1930, and died in Los Angeles on August 26, 1930, of a throat haemorrhage. He was forty seven. MGM observed two minutes of silence.
Is Lon Chaney Jr the son of Lon Chaney
Creighton Tull Chaney, born in 1906, was his son by his first wife, Cleva Creighton. Chaney kept him out of the business, and the young man worked in trade jobs until after his father's death. He took the name Lon Chaney Jr. in 1935 under pressure from producers, disliked it, and became known for Of Mice and Men in 1939, produced by Hal Roach, and The Wolf Man in 1941. The two never appeared in a film together.
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