Buster Keaton (1895-1966)
On stage from the age of three, Joseph Frank Keaton was nicknamed Buster by Houdini, He was the youngest, most cinematically inventive and endearing of Hollywood’s three greatest silent comics (the others being Chaplin and Lloyd), and the only one to experience post-stardom obscurity, though, fortunately, his films were discovered and his reputation restored in the 1960s. The stone-faced Buster was the determined, dedicated everyman, a Sisyphus who sometimes manages to get his stone over the hill. His finest films – The Play House (1921), Sherlock Jr (1924) and the railroad epic The General (1926) – are unsurpassed