Iowa Public Television

American Masters

Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces (#1602)

This "man of a thousand faces," Hollywood's first great leading character actor - remembered for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Phantom of the Opera and Tell It to the Marines - developed his craft by mimicking and doing pantomime to amuse his deaf parents. Born in Colorado on April Fool's Day 1883, Leonidas F. Chaney began in vaudeville, established himself as an actor, a director and a screenwriter, and was the unique master of horror - before it became a formalized genre in the 1930s. Chaney was renowned for the almost masochistic lengths to which he would go in order to portray his " injured souls." In Hunchback, for instance, he wore 70 pounds on his shoulders, covered his eyeball with an eggshell membrane and contorted his body into a straitjacket. A genius with make-up, he was able to convincingly transform himself into anything at all - the old Hollywood quip was, "Don't step on that spider, it may be Lon Chaney!" [86 minutes]

This episode has not aired in the past few months on Iowa Public Television.