Screenland (May-Oct 1930)

for May 19 30 33 fHANEY Comes Back i won t which The Great Character Actor Breaks His Long Silence want to play roles in which I can use several voices in the same picture, so that people be able to really say my own natural voice is, just as I have always used make-up, so that they don't quite know what my real face is like!'''' That's Lon Chaney's idea of keeping up the singular mystery that surrounds him, now that he's going to talk for the screen. And incidentally, in doing it, he's going to dig up all the tricks from his old bag, when he played characters on the stage before he went into pictures. For, long before he was a 'man of a thousand faces,' he was really a man of a thousand voices, a utility character player ready to jump in and play anything from a college boy to a Methusaleh; from a Dutch comedian to an English chappie. When audiences hear him use as many as five voices in a picture, they'll wonder, perhaps; but after all, when one considers his training, there's not so much to wonder at. In small traveling companies, an actor used to be ready to play anything, sometimes three or four parts in the same play. The old time stock actor learned make-up and dialect to hold his job; he had to be ready with his tricks at a moment's notice. And that's the secret of why the man of a thousand faces will have no difficulty in becoming the man of a thousand voices, too. This matter of using his natural voice was one of the things that kept Chaney holding out against the talkies for so long. "When you hear a person talk," says Chaney, "you begin to know him better. And my whole career has been devoted, in my case, to keeping people from knowing By Bradford Nelson to me. It has taken years build up a sort of mystery that is my stock in trade. And I wouldn't sacrifice it by talking. "But the public, on the other hand, demands that we screen players talk, and so talk we must. And I don't want to talk and spoil any illusion. So, when I talked over the new contract with Mr. Thalberg, among other things I mentioned that difficulty. "Thalberg saw the answer quickly. 'You've done all kinds of dialect and character stuff on the stage,' he suggested. 'Just use a couple of voices and let 'em guess.' "And so that v as the answer." Chaney's many voices are the product of long years of toil. He began practicing them when, as a prop boy in a theater at Colorado Springs, he used to watch the great stars of the day such as Mansfield, Mantell, and others, make up and assume their different roles. He used to the Terrible" one night and noting how subtle changes in voice, carriage, and make-up changed the very soul, seemingly, of the man. "Those old actors," says Chaney, "never showed the audience themselves, but literally donned the personality of the character they were playing. From the first, when I started to act, I resolved to be as like them as I could. Instead of being a type, and playing nothing but myself. I always wanted to try and play someone else, submerging my own personality. "On the stage I had plenty of chances. One of the first shows I was in, I had to play an old hick sheriff, come in on the second act as the town drunk, and in the third act play a Dutchman, (Continued on page 116) Lon Chaney held out against the talkers because he didn't want to destroy the mystery surrounding his characters. But he has finally solved the problem. watch Mansfield in "Ivan "Beau Brummell" the next,