Buster Keaton's famous stone face began as a child trick to get bigger laughs
As a toddler in his family's vaudeville act, Buster Keaton was flung across the stage by his father, with a suitcase handle sewn into his clothes. He noticed audiences laughed harder when he stayed straight-faced, so he stopped smiling. The deadpan became his trademark as the Great Stone Face.
He was born in 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, where his travelling mother happened to be, the sixth Joseph Keaton in his father's line. His father ran a medicine show that mixed performance with selling patent remedies. The nickname Buster supposedly came after he tumbled down a long staircase unharmed at 18 months, though the tale may be invented; Keaton himself later told a version crediting Harry Houdini.
From age three he performed in The Three Keatons, billed as the little boy who can't be damaged. He learned to land limp and break falls with a hand or foot, so he was rarely even bruised, and he later insisted his father never hurt him, though the act drew abuse accusations and occasional arrests. He barely attended school and learned to read from his mother. When his father's drinking endangered the act, Buster and his mother left for New York, and he soon moved into film. Army service in France during the First World War left him with permanently damaged hearing.
Working with producer Joseph Schenck and director Edward Cline, he made hit two-reel comedies such as One Week, then features including Sherlock Jr. and The General, which Orson Welles called perhaps the greatest film ever made. Roger Ebert judged his run from 1920 to 1929 the finest ever by an actor-director.
Signing with MGM in 1928 cost him his creative independence. His first marriage ended, he sank into alcoholism, and the studio fired him in 1933, finishing his time as a leading man. He rebuilt his life in the 1940s, marrying Eleanor Norris and working as a respected comic performer, with cameos in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. He died in 1966, and documentaries by Kevin Brownlow and Peter Bogdanovich have since celebrated him.
Source: Buster Keaton
