Buster Keaton

Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, comedian and director.

He is best known for his silent film work, in which his trademark was physical comedy accompanied by a stoic, deadpan expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".

He first appeared on stage in 1899 in Wilmington, Delaware.

The act was mainly a comedy sketch.

Myra played the saxophone to one side, while Joe and Keaton performed center stage, both wearing slapshoes, bald-headed wigs and "Irish" beards.

The young Keaton goaded his father by disobeying him, and the elder Keaton responded by throwing him against the scenery, into the orchestra pit, or even into the audience.

A suitcase handle was sewn into Keaton's clothing to aid with the constant tossing.

The act evolved as Keaton learned to take trick falls safely; he was rarely injured or bruised on stage.

This knockabout style of comedy led to accusations of child abuse, and occasionally, arrest.

However, Keaton was always able to show the authorities that he had no bruises or broken bones.

He was eventually billed as "The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged", and the overall act as "The Roughest Act That Was Ever in the History of the Stage".

Decades later, Keaton said that he was never hurt by his father and that the falls and physical comedy were a matter of proper technical execution.

In 1914, he told the Detroit News: "The secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment."

Keaton said he had so much fun that he sometimes began laughing as his father threw him across the stage.

Noticing that this caused the audience to laugh less, he adopted his famous deadpan expression when performing.

The act ran up against laws banning child performers in vaudeville.

According to one biographer, Keaton was made to go to school while performing in New York, but only attended for part of one day.

Despite tangles with the law, Keaton was a rising and relatively well-paid star in the theater.

Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" as having made him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies".

Working with independent producer Joseph M. Schenck and filmmaker Edward F. Cline, Keaton made a series of successful two-reel comedies in the early 1920s, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), Cops (1922), and The Electric House (1922).

He then moved to feature-length films; several of them, such as Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928), remain highly regarded.

The General is viewed as his masterpiece: Orson Welles considered it "the greatest comedy ever made...and perhaps the greatest film ever made".

He recovered in the 1940s, remarried, and revived his career as an honored comic performer for the rest of his life, earning an Academy Honorary Award in 1959.

Late in his career, Keaton made cameos in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Chaplin's Limelight, Samuel Beckett's Film and the Twilight Zone episode "Once Upon a Time".

Keaton is often described as having been ahead of his time; Anthony Lane wrote "He was just too good, in too many ways, too soon...He is the first action hero; to be precise, he is a small, pale-faced American who is startled, tripped, drenched and inspired into becoming a hero."

Keaton was born into a vaudeville family in Piqua, Kansas, the small town which his mother, Myra Keaton (née Cutler), was visiting at the time.

He was named Joseph to continue a tradition on his father's side (he was sixth in a line bearing the name Joseph Keaton) and Frank for his maternal grandfather, who disapproved of his parents' union.

His father was Joseph Hallie "Joe" Keaton who had a traveling show called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, which performed on stage and sold patent medicine on the side.

According to a frequently repeated story, which may be apocryphal, Keaton acquired the nickname Buster at the age of 18 months.

After the child fell down a long flight of stairs without injury, an actor friend named George Pardey remarked, "Gee whiz, he's a regular buster!"

After this, Keaton's father began to use the nickname to refer to the youngster.

Keaton retold the anecdote over the years, including in a 1964 interview with the CBC's Telescope.

In Keaton's retelling, he was six months old when the incident occurred, and Harry Houdini gave him the nickname (though the family did not get to know Houdini until later).

At the age of three, Keaton began performing with his parents in The Three Keatons.

In 1996, Entertainment Weekly recognized Keaton as the seventh-greatest film director, writing that "More than Chaplin, Keaton understood movies: He knew they consisted of a four-sided frame in which resided a malleable reality off which his persona could bounce. A vaudeville child star, Keaton grew up to be a tinkerer, an athlete, a visual mathematician; his films offer belly laughs of mind-boggling physical invention and a spacey determination that nears philosophical grandeur."

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him as the 21st-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema.

In 2018, Peter Bogdanovich released The Great Buster: A Celebration, a tribute to Keaton featuring Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Werner Herzog and Quentin Tarantino, among others.

Keaton's art has inspired full academic study.

His career declined when he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and lost his artistic independence.

His wife divorced him, he lost his home, and he descended into alcoholism.