Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1927)

Behind Lon Chaney's Mask 17 I have never before known an actor who deliberately invited trouble, discomfort, and physical hardship, as Chaney does, for the purposes of his work. There is no one comparable to him except an East Indian dervish, who, fired with an overwhelming passion for his faith, inflicts corporal punishment upon himself to prove his complete devotion. To be sure, we all have known actors and authors and other artists who have now and again invited trouble for themselves. But not from choice. They just haven't known any better. But with Chaney it is quite a different story. Of him it may truly be said, here is an actor who verily suffers for his art. In "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," he wore a pack of steel on his back, for the purpose of creating a deformity, and a steel vise Avhich distorted his legs, not to mention a heavy mask to emphasize facial grotesqueries, all of which doubtless caused him great discomfort. In "The Penalty," one of his first conspicuous pictures following "The Miracle Man," he had his legs below the knee strapped upward and back to give the appearance of being legless. A medical solution was used in one of his eyes in "The Road to Mandalay" to achieve the realistic effect of a cataract. A painful process and certainly dangerous. As the aged mandarin in "Mr. Wu," he wore clamps on his cheeks to pull them tightly back, and thus give his face the sunken, withered aspect of senility. And, now, in his latest picture, "The Unknown," he has his arms clamped down over his stomach, to dispose of them altogether. No device Chaney uses to simulate physical deformity is easy to wear. But the more painful it is to endure, the better he likes it. And that's the real actor in Chaney. He has an intense fervor for his work. He isn't abnormal nor mad, as some people say. Not any more than any other fine artist. He just loves grease paint and the rest of the props, or symbols, of the show business. He is a thorough trouper. He has traveled the long, hazardous road, beginning as a green stage hand shifting scenery for Richard Mansfield and Madame Modjeska, the famed tragedienne, and ending as a buckand-wing dancer in vaudeville and obscure musical comedies. He knows what the show business is about. The same with pictures, too. He started where nearly all the big ones did. Right at the bottom — as an extra, He began his career as a dancer stage hand, and for years knew the joys and hardships of a in vaudeville and obscure musical shows. riding a horse for Universal in two-reel Westerns. Which probably means, without casting any direct aspersions on Chaney's early horsemanship, that he learned the moving-picture business from the ground up. Those who know Chaney — and there aren't many — have often told me that he is an excellent business man. I don't doubt it ; and since all good business men are mainly concerned with protecting and building up the interests of their investments, Chaney well deserves the description. Because his big investment in moving pictures is talent, technique, and the concentration of all his faculties and forces on just one thing — his work. He has a wonderful business partner, however, in his wife. A woman who is the mother of his twenty-oneyear-old son, Creighton, a woman who thoroughly understands Lon, and since she herself was of the stage, a woman able to view the world of make-believe through wise and experienced eyes. Her working hand in hand