Lon Chaney — Blue Book of the Screen (1923) 🇺🇸

Once upon a time someone coined the word “gamut,” but it remained for the cinema to come along and develop one of the most interesting human “scales” that the entertainment-loving public ever worshiped.

He is a veritable “man of a thousand characters,” very seldom playing them twice alike. At one time he is the terror of the underworld, a tough “customer” for the most rugged assailant. Next he is the legless cripple, then, “dissolving out,” he reappears, a bland and harmless Chinaman, with slanting eyes and cunning air. Anyone can guess the name.

Lon Chaney gave color to Colorado Springs, Colorado, by making it his birthplace. He attended school there through the fifth grade. Then he determined to become an actor. He entered the theatre at the age of ten. The managerial eye being far from penetrating, he was assigned to the important task of making himself useful with the stage hands.

Next he attained the heights of chorus boy. How well he sang his memoirs do not state.

Then someone discovered that Chaney could “make them laugh.” Thus began his long engagement as comedian in musical comedy, which called for varying makeup and frequent change of character.

However, during that long period upon the stage, Chaney, whose forte afterwards proved to be dramatics, never was called upon for serious work.

He made a gradual upclimb but general recognition came at a single bound. It was Mr. Chaney’s remarkable twisted form and work as the cripple in “The Miracle Man,” which brought him immediate fame. Since then he has been the feature character in leading productions of the screen, exhibiting true genius in the art of make-up.

Chaney is fond of reading, his favorites being the works of Emerson and Dumas, and Wells’ “Outline of History.” He is five feet nine and a half inches tall, and weighs 165 pounds. He has dark eyes and brown hair.

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Lon Chaney, “the man of a thousand faces,” in one of them.

Collection: The Blue Book of the Screen (1923)