was a phenomenon of the silent cinema and, according to exhibitors, he was the most popular male star of 1929 (Studlar 202). He was born in 1883 and began a theatrical career in his late teens, working with touring vaudeville acts for about ten years before moving into film. During 1912 and 1913, his first film work was in uncredited bit parts for various studios but he then worked under contract to Universal until around 1917, after which Chaney again worked for various studios and made a name for himself in strong supporting roles, such as in The Scarlet Car (1917) and Riddle Gawne (1918). His break came in 1919, when he played "The Frog" in The Miracle Man, the same year that he also made The Wicked Darling for Universal, which was his first feature-length collaboration with director Tod Browning, with whom he would work ten times over the following decade, particularly during the period 1925-1930, when Chaney was working exclusively for M-G-M. By the time he signed his contract with M-G-M, Chaney was already a huge star, who was known for his mastery of make-up and disguise, a skill that he used to great effect throughout the 1920s, and earned him the name of "The Man With a Thousand Faces". When sound was being introduced during the late 1920s, Chaney initially resisted the transition and, by the time that he made his first sound film, a remake of his 1925 film The Unholy Three, he had been diagnosed with cancer, and passed away one month after the film's release.Following his death, the industry was eager to find a replacement and the horror stars that emerged after 1930 were usually judged in relation to him. For example, in 1933 alone, it was suggested that Lon Chaney's 'historical mantle … has apparently descended on Mr Karloff's shoulders" (Mannock 30), while Claude Rains was declared to be 'the new Lon Chaney' (Anon, "New" 5). However, although Chaney is acknowledged to be a key figure in the history of horror in particular, and of cinema more generally, it is still the case that, as 2 2 Gaylyn Studlar observed over twenty-five years ago, beyond The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), "the numerous other films from his seventeenyear movie career are almost totally neglected by contemporary scholars." (204; for notable exceptions see Skal and Worland) 1Studlar's study of him is therefore an important intervention and it brilliantly explores the "failed and freakish" masculinities that he performed (210), masculinities that drew upon the traditions of the Freak Show. However, she is too quick to read him as different from other male stars such as John Barrymore and Rudolph Valentino and this is due to an understandable, but none the less misleading, focus on the body. As she puts it, "Chaney's variations of the grotesque male body create a radical contrast with the male body foregrounded for the audience's spectacular consumption of Barrymore, Valentino, and, albeit in less explicitly sexual ways, of Fairbanks." (201)For example, the focus on the body distracts from that...
