Lon Chaney was an American television and movie actor.
Background
Lon Chaney was born on February 10, 1906 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States. His parents, Lon Chaney and Frances Cleveland Bush, began their careers as small-time vaudevillians. The Chaneys spent many years following the vaudeville circuit across the country while Creighton Chaney was growing up. Eventually, Lon Chaney, Sr. , became well established in Hollywood, starring in a number of films that required heavy use of makeup, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. His many roles in horror films earned him the title "The Man of a Thousand Faces. " Before Lon Chaney could make the transition to the talkies, he died of throat cancer in 1933.
Career
Although Lon Chaney, Sr. , actively dissuaded his son from entering show business, Creighton Chaney began to seek work in Hollywood even before his father's death. He later recalled that his father had warned him, "I've taken my bumps, I know. " Thanks in part to the elder Chaney's established name in Hollywood, Creighton Chaney soon found work. Although he began as a stunt man, he earned his first film credit within a year, appearing in Bird of Paradise. RKO then put him on contract, casting him for a role in the serial The Last Frontier. Because of his height and build--he stood over six feet four with broad shoulders, craggy features, and a wide back--he was cast as the "heavy" in a number of minor films during the 1930's, including Road Demon (1938) and Jesse James (1939). Chaney finally found a role that was perfectly suited to him as the tragic, half-witted Lenny in the film version of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Chaney premiered the role in a theater production that toured the Pacific Coast, and then gained the part in the Hal Roach-directed film. Opposite Burgess Meredith, who played George, Lenny's friend, protector, and ultimate executioner, Chaney infused his role with humanity and sympathy. Critics lauded Chaney's performance in a role that allowed him to escape his father's long shadow. Of Mice and Men should have given Chaney an entree into other high-quality productions. Chaney instead turned to horror films that capitalized on his father's name, but were much inferior to the classics that had featured the elder Chaney. Creighton Chaney went so far as to change his name to Lon Chaney, Jr. This "piece of showmanship, " as Variety reported it, pleased theater owners and movie executives who stood to gain by Lon Chaney's continued marquee value. Others were less appreciative, however, seeing Chaney's new moniker as a crass attempt to cash in on his father's legitimate career that had been ended by a premature death. Man-Made Monster, released in 1940, did little to mollify Chaney's critics. Chaney regained some credibility with his next performance, however. Universal Pictures, despite the miserable box office results of The Werewolf of London in 1935, revamped the trite werewolf genre with The Wolf Man (1941) and chose Chaney for the lead. While the casting of Chaney was calculated to connect the film to the elder Chaney, both the film's high production quality and Chaney's sympathetic performance received critical acclaim. Chaney played Larry Talbot, an American college student who visits Wales and suffers the inevitable bite from a werewolf "during a midnight stroll on the moors. The Wolf Man was noted for its graphic transformation scenes, which used tightly focused shots of Chaney reverting from human to werewolf. Shooting these scenes required twenty-two hours to produce a few minutes of finished film. The movie also featured a strong supporting cast, including Bela Lugosi as the werewolf and Claude Rains as Talbot's father. At this point in his career, Chaney took roles in a series of third-rate productions, slipping ever deeper into his father's shadow. While he lost the chance of gaining legitimacy in his own right, he never had to look very hard for work. He eventually appeared in over eighty movies. Chaney's Wolf Man character made the rounds in a number of horror films in the 1940's, usually as the sidekick monster. In Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), Chaney played the werewolf to Boris Karloff's monster. This gaudy exploitation of past triumphs in the genre had none of the breakthrough qualities of The Wolf Man and lacked the earlier film's strong supporting cast. Standards slipped a bit more with House of Frankenstein, in which Universal was "inspired to add more fiends to its predictable witch's brew. " Gene Wright, in the retrospective Horrorshows, called the film "flimsy and predictable, " but wrote, "It's an enjoyable monster mash, and if the creatures aren't very frightening, it's because by now they had begun to assume the familiarity of old friends. " Other critics were less forgiving. Frank Mankel, in Terrors of the Screen, saw Chaney's roles in House of Frankenstein and similar vehicles such as The Mummy's Tomb (1942), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), The Son of Dracula (1943), and The House of Dracula (1945) as shams: "When these relatively cheap, crude movies failed to attract audiences, [Chaney] joined with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in spoofing the very roles he had helped to downgrade [in] Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). " During the 1950's and 1960's, Chaney mostly gave his monsters a rest, but the quality of his roles did not improve. His film credits during this period included Casanova's Big Night (1953), Not as a Stranger (1955), The Black Sleep (1956), The Defiant Ones (1958), Apache Uprising (1966), and Buckskin (1968), among many others. He occasionally appeared in horror films, including Manfish (1956), Cyclops (1957), The Haunted Palace (1963), and Hillbillies in a Haunted House (1967). He also starred as the Indian Chingachgook in the television series based on James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1956). Chaney's sole demanding part came in High Noon (1952), where he played the retired sheriff to Gary Cooper's heroic Marshal Kane. Chaney's last years were difficult, as he suffered from numerous ailments, including gout, cataracts, liver disorders, and beriberi. He withdrew from public view, and when he died in 1973, his last wish "was that his death receive no publicity. " Most of his obituaries referred to him as the "son of one of the giants of the silver screen, " or made similar references to his father. In 1978, rock star Warren Zevon paid tribute to the Chaneys in his Top Ten hit "Werewolves of London. "
Achievements
Connections
Married for the first time in 1933, he was divorced three years later after having two children. Chaney then married Patsy Beck, a model, in 1937, and they remained together until his death.