Lon Chaney Quotes

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/I), 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/I), 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/I), 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.