Lon Chaney Sr.
Lon Chaney, Jr. talking about his father The Man Of 1,000 Faces on the television show “You Asked For It”.
Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry and Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), via universalmonstersblog.
Tod Browning and Lon Chaney Sr. Collaborations
Since the beginning of motion pictures, there have been directors and actors whose creative collaborations have provided filmgoers with some of the screen’s most magical moments: Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, John Ford and John Wayne, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, and Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, just to name a few. One of the most fascinating of these cinematic pairings, and also one of the first, was between a director who ran away to join the circus as a teenager and was forever shaped by life under the big top, and an actor who served as his deaf parents’ link to the hearing world and learned first-hand the life of an outsider. The parallel hardships and tragedies in the lives of Tod Browning and Lon Chaney helped to make several of the 10 films they made between 1919-1929 among the strangest and most fascinating of the silent era.
Such Films include The Wicked Darling (1919), Outside The Law (1920), The Unholy Three (1925), The Blackbird (1926), The Road To Mandalay (1926), The Unknown (1927), London After Midnight (1927), The Big City (1928), West Of Zanzibar (1928), and Where East is East (1929). Chaney would have also played Dracula (1931) but unfortunately his life ended before the film could begin.
