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(February 10, 1906 – July 12, 1973)
Born Creighton Tull Chaney in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Lon Chaney,
Sr. and Cleva Creighton Chaney, a singing stage performer who
traveled in road shows across the country with Lon.
 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). He first achieved
stardom and critical acclaim in the 1939 feature film version of Of
Mice and Men, in which he played Lennie Small.
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 played Dracula in Son of Dracula, a
role for which he initially seemed completely wrong. But by playing
the part with a quiet, ultra-controlled sense of menace he overcame
the miscasting, and Dracula is now generally regarded as his best
role in a Universal picture since the original Wolf Man. Chaney is
thus the only actor to portray all four of Universal's major
monsters: Wolf Man; Frankenstein Monster; 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, 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 top-flight cameo
artiste for 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.
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 put in guest shots on
everything from Wagon Train to The Monkees -- and a string of
low-budget but entertaining and very traditional Westerns produced
by A.C. Lyles for Paramount. |
