Lon Chaney Jr. , the actor who became Hollywood’s most versatile horror star, was born Creighton Tull Chaney on February 10, 1906, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was the son of silent film legend Lon Chaney, known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces” for his transformative makeup work in classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). His parents divorced in 1913, and young Creighton spent several years in boarding schools before returning home in 1916 after his father remarried.
Despite his father’s towering legacy in show business, Lon Chaney Sr. actively discouraged his son from pursuing an acting career. Instead, Creighton worked as an advertising manager for a water heater company and a plumbing firm. He married Dorothy Hinley, with whom he had two sons, before the couple divorced in 1936.
He then married Patsy Beck in 1937. When his father died of throat cancer on August 26, 1930, at just 47 years old, Creighton began acting in films, mostly Westerns, often performing his own stunts. He initially used his birth name but began being billed as Lon Chaney Jr. starting with the 1935 film A Scream in the Night.
He accepted the use of his father’s name to advance his career but disliked the “Jr. ” that studios insisted on adding. He spent the late 1930s appearing in Westerns alongside stars like John Wayne and in numerous films at 20th Century Fox, including This Is My Affair with Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck. While making the 1939 film Jesse James, he was nearly killed by a train during production.
His only stage appearance came as Lennie in a production of Of Mice and Men, a role he later reprised in the film version. Chaney Jr. ’s breakthrough in horror came with the 1941 science-fiction film Man-Made Monster. Later that same year, he took the title role in The Wolf Man, a film whose success earned him a long-term contract with Universal Pictures and made him an official horror star.
That success, however, would typecast him for the rest of his career. He went on to appear in The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy’s Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Son of Dracula, The Mummy’s Ghost, House of Frankenstein, and The Mummy’s Curse. In 1948, he played the Wolf Man in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where he also stood in for actor Glenn Strange, who played the Frankenstein monster, while Strange recovered from a broken ankle. In 1945, Chaney Jr.
was released from his Universal contract due to his struggles with alcohol. Despite the typecasting, he never stopped working. In the 1950s, he appeared in widely varied films including High Noon, I Died a Thousand Times, Springfield Rifle, Casanova’s Big Night, Big House USA, and The Defiant Ones. He also worked extensively in television on shows such as Wagon Train, Route 66, Rawhide, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Rifleman, and The Monkees.
His 1960s films were mostly low-budget Westerns and horror pictures like Haunted Palace, Spider Baby, and Apache Uprising. His final horror film was Dracula vs. Frankenstein in 1971. Chaney Jr.
holds the distinction of being the only actor to portray all four of Universal’s major horror icons: the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and Count Dracula. He was well liked by some co-workers and despised by others. He was known to stand up for older actors he felt were mistreated by the studios. One notable example involved William Farnum, a silent film star with a bit part in The Mummy’s Curse.
Chaney Jr. insisted that Farnum be given his own chair on set and treated with respect, threatening to quit the picture if that did not happen. Actor Robert Stack claimed in his 1980 autobiography that Chaney Jr. and his drinking buddy Broderick Crawford were known around the Universal lot as “the monsters” because they would get drunk together and take turns beating each other up.
Chaney Jr. was known for his deep love of animals and frequently brought his dogs, including one named Moose, onto movie sets. In the year before his death, he suffered from throat cancer, among other illnesses. Lon Chaney Jr.
died on July 12, 1973, from cardiac failure in San Clemente, California. He was 67 years old. Reports conflict over what happened to his remains; some say his body was cremated and the ashes scattered, while others say his body was donated to USC for medical research. Though he remained forever associated with horror, Chaney Jr.
’s filmography was far broader than the genre that made him famous.
