4 October: Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton, the silent movie actor, was born on this date in 1895. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. His real name was Joseph Frank Keaton and he was born in Piqua, Kansas.
2. His parents were Vaudeville performers, and Buster himself started performing with them at the age of three. Their act was called The Three Keatons.
3. He got the nickname when he was just six months old, from none other than Harry Houdini. Keaton's parents were at the time touring with him in a show promoting miracle cures. The six month old fell down the stairs and wasn't even bruised. "That was a Buster," said Houdini, and the name stuck. His other nickname was "The Great Stone Face" because of his deadpan expression.
4. He started making silent films when he was 21. His first film was called The Butcher Boy and his co-star was Fatty Arbuckle.
5. He did all his own stunts, including the famous scene where the facade of a house falls on him and he is unhurt because he's standing just where the open Window is. He wasn't always unscathed, though. He broke his ankle on one occasion and on another, broke his neck. He wasn't even aware he'd broken his neck until years later when he got an X Ray.
6. He preferred improvisation to working from a script, and to convey the plot of the film through actions and pantomime, rather than use title cards. Most silent movies made use of 240 or so title cards to help explain the plot. Keaton never used more than 56.
7. His personal life was quite chaotic for a while. His first wife was Natalie Talmadge, sister of the actress Norma. They had three sons, but then the marriage began to go wrong. Natalie decided she didn't want any more children; they started sleeping in separate rooms; he was not only extravagant, spending too much on clothes, he also dated at least two other women before the couple divorced in 1932. His career wasn't going so well either at this point and he started drinking. He ended up in an institution, but escaped from the straitjacket they put him in thanks to tricks he'd learned from Houdini. While on a bender, he married his nurse, Mae Scriven, and claimed afterwards to remember nothing about it. She claimed she didn't even know his first name until after the wedding. Nevertheless it was two years before she caught him with another woman and filed for divorce. He married Eleanor Norris in 1940. She was 23 years younger than him, but it was a successful marriage which lasted until Keaton died.
8. In the 1960s when he was 67 years old, he starred in Beer commercials, re-creating some of the scenes from his silent films.
9. He died of lung cancer in 1966 at the age of 70.
10. Members of his fan club are called Damfinos. They hold an annual convention in Muskegon, Michigan, chosen because Keaton had a summer home there.

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