Biography

A quiet soul by nature, he valued his privacy highly. Granting few interviews and disliking the Hollywood social whirl, he much preferred spending quiet time with his family and a few close friends, often at his cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This avoidance of publicity led to his being unfairly labeled by some as strange and unfriendly. However, those who knew him best always described him as a good, loving husband, father, and friend. Similarly, his co-stars, among them Loretta Young and Joan Crawford, remembered him as being very cooperative and helpful, especially to those performers without much experience.

Were it not for his death, he rather than Bela Lugosi would have been Tod Browning's choice for the starring role in Dracula (1931).

A popular joke of the era was "Don't step on it; it might be Lon Chaney!".

His knowledge of make-up was so vast that he wrote the entry on the subject for an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced a publicity reel in the 1920s that featured all their contract players standing in a line as the camera panned to film them. At one point, we see a man speaking and gesturing to those around him, but with his back to the camera. Although he was not identified in the film, this was Chaney. Even in a publicity film, he didn't want the public to see his face without character make-up.

Between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney.

My whole career has been devoted to keeping people from knowing me.

When a makeup is as painful as that which I wore as Blizzard in The Penalty (1920), when I had my legs strapped up and couldn't bear it that way more than 20 minutes at a time - when I have to be a cripple, as in The Miracle Man (1919) or have to keep a certain attitude of body, as I did in Shadows (1922), it sometimes takes a good deal of imagination to forget your physical sufferings. Yet, at that, the subconscious mind has a marvelous way of making you keep the right attitudes and make the right gestures when you are actually acting.

I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice. The dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals. Most of my roles since The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), such as The Phantom of the Opera (1925), He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Unholy Three (1925), etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are the stories which I wish to do.

There's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.