For Chaney, acting was the art of continual transformation, and it came from a desire to become someone else, to leave his own skin and enter another's.

For Chaney, acting was the art of continual transformation, and it came from a desire to become someone else, to leave his own skin and enter another's.

She was the archetypal silent film heroine -- the delicate damsel in distress, fainting on an ice floe, cowering before a brutal bounder, languishing in a garret.