Lon Chaney, Jr.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008)
Lon Chaney, Jr.
(145 × 236 pixel, file size: 21 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
Born Creighton Tull Chaney
February 10, 1906(1906-02-10)
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
Died July 12, 1973 (aged 67)
San Clemente, California, United States
Spouse(s) Dorothy Hinckley
Patsy Beck

Lon Chaney, Jr. (February 10, 1906 – July 12, 1973) was an American character actor, known mainly for his roles in monster movies and as the son of silent film actor Lon Chaney. He was first credited as "Lon Chaney, Jr." only in 1935, as a studio marketing ploy by a small production outfit. Chaney, Jr. had English, French and Irish ancestry.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Born Creighton Tull Chaney in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the son of Lon Chaney and Frances Cleveland Creighton Chaney, a singing stage performer who traveled in road shows across the country with Lon. His parents' troubled marriage ended in divorce in 1913 following a scandalous public suicide attempt by his mother in Los Angeles. Young Creighton lived in various homes and boarding schools until 1916, when his father (now employed in films) remarried Hazel Hastings and could provide a stable home. Many articles and biographies over the years report that Creighton was led to believe his mother Cleva had died while he was a boy, and was only made aware she lived after his father's death in 1930.

From an early age he worked hard to avoid his famous father's shadow. In young adulthood, his father discouraged him from show business, and he attended business college and became successful in a Los Angeles appliance corporation. No film or photographs seem to exist of the two Chaneys together in the same frame as adults, which is remarkable since the senior Chaney had attained a career level of global fame exceeded only by Charles Chaplin.

[edit] Career

It was only after his father's death that Chaney started acting in movies, beginning with an uncredited role in the 1932 film Girl Crazy. He appeared in films under his real name Creighton until 1935, when he began to be billed as "Lon Chaney, Jr." (and would appear as "Lon Chaney" later in his career). Chaney was asked to test for the role of Quasimodo for the 1939 remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The role went to Charles Laughton. In his final years, Lon would get a brief chance to play Quasimodo, and return to the roles of the Mummy, and the Wolfman on the 1960s television series "Route 66" with friends Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. Lon first achieved stardom and critical acclaim in the 1939 feature film version of Of Mice and Men, in which he played Lennie Small.

Lon Chaney Jr. in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
Lon Chaney Jr. in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man

In 1941, Chaney starred in the title role of The Wolf Man for Universal Pictures Co. Inc., a role which would typecast him for the rest of his life. He maintained a career at Universal horror movies over the next few years, replaying the Wolf Man in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein, Kharis the mummy in The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Ghost and The Mummy's Curse. He also played Dracula in Son of Dracula. Chaney is thus the only actor to portray all four of Universal's major monsters: the Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and Dracula. Universal also starred him in a series of psychological mysteries associated with the Inner Sanctum radio series. He also played western heroes, such as in the serial Overland Mail, but the six-foot, 220-pound actor often appeared as mundane heavies. After leaving Universal Studios, where he made thirty films, he worked primarily in character roles in low-budget films, due to typecasting and alcoholism. In later years he often played mute or brutish roles, partly due to the ravages of throat cancer, the same disease that claimed his father's life. In his final feature film, Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), he played Groton, Dr. Frankenstein's mute henchman.

While continuing to pop up in lower budget horror epics throughout the 1950s, Chaney also established himself as a favorite of producer Stanley Kramer, taking key supporting roles in the classic western High Noon (1952) (starring Gary Cooper), Not as a Stranger (1955), a hospital melodrama featuring Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra, and The Defiant Ones (1958, starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.) Kramer told the press at the time that whenever a script came in with a role too difficult for most actors in Hollywood, he called Chaney.

Most talked about was a 1952 live television version of Frankenstein on the anthology series Tales of Tomorrow during which Chaney, playing the Monster, was so drunk that he thought he was rehearsing and picked up furniture that he was supposed to break only to gingerly put it back down while muttering, "Break later." A kinescope of the January 18, 1952 broadcast is available on YouTube, and open to the public for viewing at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and Los Angeles. Chaney's bald and scarred makeup in this show closely resembles that worn by Robert De Niro in a 1994 big-screen treatment.

He became quite popular with baby boomers, however, after Universal released its backlog of horror films to television in 1956 and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine regularly focused on his films. He was honored by appearing as the Wolf Man on one of a 1997 series of United States postage stamps depicting movie monsters, as was Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and The Mummy, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and Lon Chaney, Sr. as The Phantom of the Opera.

In 1957, Chaney went to Ontario, Canada to costar in the first ever American-Canadian television production, as Chingachgook in Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans, suggested by James Fenimore Cooper's stories. The series ended after 39 episodes.

In the 1960s, Chaney's career ran the gamut from decent horror productions, such as Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace and big-studio Westerns such as 1967's Welcome to Hard Times, to such bottom-of-the-barrel fodder as Hillbillys in a Haunted House and Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors (both 1967). His bread-and-butter work during this decade was television - where he made guest appearances on everything from Wagon Train to The Monkees - and in a string of supporting roles in low-budget but entertaining and very traditional Westerns featuring middle-aged casts and produced by A. C. Lyles for Paramount.

From a personal standpoint, Chaney seemed to have been well-liked by his co-workers - "sweet" is the adjective that most commonly emerges from people who acted with him - yet he was capable of intense dislikes. For instance, he and frequent co-star Evelyn Ankers did not get along at all (he called her "Shankers" and she once characterized him as "The Mad Ghoul"), despite their undeniable on-camera chemistry. Chaney is also said to have had a belligerent relationship with actor Martin Kosleck. Years after the fact, Kosleck explained this as a case of jealousy over Kosleck's (self-described) superior talent. Chaney had run-ins with actor Frank Reicher (whom Chaney nearly strangled on camera in The Mummy's Ghost) and director Robert Siodmak (over whose head Chaney broke a vase).[citation needed]

Chaney always projected a peculiar childlike quality on screen, no matter how old he was, which meant that his best roles tended to be those for which a childish, helpless or subservient quality was requisite, such as "Lennie," "Larry Talbot," and even in later years some of his roles as weak and/or alcoholic parents. Only rarely did this quality drop, as was the case with his performance as "Dracula" in Son of Dracula and years later as "Simon Orne" in The Haunted Palace. Chaney never for a moment escaped the long shadow of his father, one of the screen's greatest actors. Nonetheless, Chaney Jr. gave a number of strong performances with notable individuality.

[edit] Personal life

Married twice, he died of liver failure in San Clemente, California. His body was donated for medical research. [1]

Chaney had two sons, Lon Ralph Chaney (born July 3, 1928) and Ronald Creighton Chaney (born March 18, 1930), both now deceased. He is survived by a grandson, Ron Chaney, who attends film conventions and discusses his grandfather's life and film career. Ron Chaney was featured on the CBS News Sunday Morning program on October 29, 2006.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Lon Chaney Jr., Actor, Is Dead at 67; Portrayed Monsters", New York Times, July 14, 1973, Saturday. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. "Lon Chaney Jr., the film actor, died yesterday at the age of 67. A long series of illnesses had put Mr. Chaney in and out of hospitals for the last year. He was released from a San Clemente ..." 

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Chaney, Lon, Jr.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chaney, Creighton Tull
SHORT DESCRIPTION Actor
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States
DATE OF DEATH July 12, 1973
PLACE OF DEATH San Clemente, California, United States