Buster Keaton

Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, comedian and film director. He is best known for his silent films during the 1920s, in which he performed physical comedy and inventive stunts. He frequently 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 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 perhaps his most acclaimed work; Orson Welles considered it "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. His career recovered somewhat in the 1940s after he married Eleanor Norris, and he worked as an honored comic performer until the end of his life. During this period, he made cameos in Billy Wilder's ''Sunset Boulevard'' (1950), Charlie Chaplin's ''Limelight'' (1952), Samuel Beckett's ''Film'' (1965) and a variety of television programs. He earned an Academy Honorary Award in 1959.

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". In 1996, ''Entertainment Weekly'' recognized Keaton as the seventh-greatest film director, stating that "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. Provided by Wikipedia