Buster Keaton: Biography and Background

Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, comedian and filmmaker. He is best known for his silent films, in which he performed physical comedy and inventive stunts. He maintained a stoic, deadpan facial expression that became his trademark and earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".

Keaton was a child vaudeville star, performing as part of his family's traveling act. As an adult, he began working with independent producer Joseph M. Schenck and filmmaker Edward F. Cline, with whom he made successful two-reel comedies in the early 1920s, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921) and The Electric House (1922). He moved to feature-length films, including Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Orson Welles called The General "the greatest comedy ever made...and perhaps the greatest film ever made".

Keaton's career declined after 1928, when he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and lost his artistic independence. His first wife divorced him, and he descended into alcoholism. He was fired from MGM in 1933, ending his career as a leading man in feature films. He recovered in the 1940s, marrying Eleanor Norris and working as an honored comic performer until the end of his life. During this period, he made cameos in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952).

Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" making him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies". In 1996, Entertainment Weekly recognized Keaton as the seventh-greatest film director, writing "his films offer belly laughs of mind-boggling physical invention and a spacey determination that nears philosophical grandeur." The American Film Institute included The General, Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator on their AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list. He is the subject of Kevin Brownlow's Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow (1987) and Peter Bogdanovich's The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018).

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