USPS Silent Screen Stars

USPS in 1994 honoured the Silent Screen Stars Theda Bara, Zasu Pitts, Clara Bow. Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Lon Chaney, Rudolph Valentino, John Gilbert and the Keystone Cops on postage stamps. The stamps were designed and drawn by Al Hirschfeld, and were issued in San Francisco, California.

Theda Bara (1885-1955) was a prominent silent film star of the early twentieth century. Bara is most well known for her role as a femme fatale, also known as a seductress. She played the character of the femme fatale for many of her prominent movies, including Cleopatra and Carmen. However, Theda Bara also enjoyed exploring different roles she could play with the characters she portrayed. Because of her iconic performances as a seducing woman, Theda Bara is remembered as one of the best actresses within silent film. 

The Keystone Film Company’s troupe of comic actors arrived in Hollywood the same day as the town’s annual Shriner parade. Seizing on the opportunity, Mack Sennett, the Keystone’s director, sent his star comedienne Mabel Normand into the parade. Clutching a baby doll, she began searching the ranks of Shriners for the child’s supposed father. In hot pursuit was Ford Sterling, playing the part of Mabel’s irate, two-timed husband. When a brawl erupted between Sterling and an embarrassed Shriner, the police came charging in to break it up. Meanwhile Sennett, who had set up his camera, captured the entire ruckus on film and sent it off to New York as the first Keystone comedy.  master of comic timing, Sennett used this formula of spontaneity and controlled confusion to create more than 1,000 short comedies.

Zasu Pitts (1889-1963) was another important silent film actress. One of Zasu Pitts most well known silent films was All Quite on the Western Front. Although she began her career in silent movies, Zasu Pitts transitioned to talking movies in the 1930’s and primarily performed in films with her comedic counterpart, Thelma Todd. Pitts had an extremely successful career on both the stage and the screen and she continued to act as late as the 1960’s. Because of her successful transition from silent movies to the “talkies” of the mid-twentieth century, Zasu Pitts is remembered as a remarkable and versatile actress. 

 Harold Lloyd (1893-1971) was a close rival of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, He was one of the most popular comedians of the silent film era. A member of Mack Sennett’s comedy troupe, he experimented with various comic characters before creating the role of “Harold.” By 1918, the white-faced man in horn-rimmed glasses and straw hat had become Lloyd’s trademark. The first comedian to use physical danger as a source of laughter, he was known as the screen’s most daring star, often performing his own stunts. In his 1923 film Safety Last, he dangled from the hands of a clock several stories above a busy city street. In Girl Shy (1924) he took a thrilling ride atop a runaway streetcar. And in The Freshman (1925) - one of the most successful of all silent films - he stood in for the football team’s tackling dummy. Although his peak of popularity was during the silent film era, Lloyd made numerous sound motion pictures as well. In 1952 he was honored with a special Academy Award for his contribution to motion picture comedy.

Clara Bow (1905-1965) was perhaps the most influential female actress of silent film. She achieved national fame in the 1920s with her roles as a seductress and flapper in silent and talking films. Bow’s revealing clothes and spirited character in her films, greatly influenced American women’s fashion and societal roles during the 1920s. Clara Bow is remembered by American filmmakers to this day for her revolutionary effect on American women and society as a whole. 

 

Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926) was idolised as the “Great Lover” of the 1920s, Rudolph Valentino gained enormous fame for his passionate, romantic roles.  Although his performance in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) established Valentino as a star, it was his role as the desert warrior in The Sheik (1921), that gained him a national following - making him the most popular romantic star of the silent film era.

Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) won international fame with his portrayal of the pathetic, yet humorous and endearing “Little Tramp.” During the silent film era he was often hailed as “the funniest man in the world.” The son of British vaudeville performers, Chaplin began acting at an early age. In 1913 he signed on with the Keystone Film Company. Instantly popular, his box-office appeal had become so great by 1919 that no studio could afford to hire him. So together with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith, he formed the United Artists film corporation and began appearing only in films produced by himself, including such classics as The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940). 

Lon Chaney (1883-1930), often called the “Man of a Thousand Faces,” is best remembered for hi macabre characterisations on the silent screen. Born of deaf-mute parents, Chaney learned pantomime at an early age, and later became a prop man, director, and actor in his brother’s traveling show. Beginning his film career as an extra, he became an overnight success after starring in The Miracle Man (1919). During the next ten years Chaney earned a reputation as the finest character actor in films, playing such memorable roles as Quasimodo the hunchback in the Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and the dual role of police inspector/vampire in London After Midnight (1927). But his greatest achievement was his characterization of Eric, the demented, acid-scarred musician who haunted the subterranean passages of the Paris Opera in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). A versatile actor, he also won acclaim for his realistic performances in Tell It to the Marines (1927), While the City Sleeps (1928), and Thunder (1929).

 

John Gilbert (1897-1936) learned everything there was to know about the movies - building sets, lighting, hand-tinting film, writing scripts, and directing - before he became an actor. In 1924 he joined the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio, starring in many of the blockbuster movies of his day. The Big Parade in 1925 was his greatest triumph. Gilbert’s performance as a doughboy in World War I not only established him as the all-American boy, fearless hero, and romantic lover, but also earned him the Photoplay Award for 1926 (the predecessor to the Academy Award). In 1926 he starred in Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo. This seething melodrama established them as the greatest romantic team in Hollywood.  

Buster Keaton's (1895-1966) stoic manner and poker face was as familiar to movie-goers of the 1920s as Charlie Chaplin’s baggy trousers and derby hat. Born Frank Joseph Keaton, he began performing in his parents’ vaudeville act as the “Human Mop” when he was only four. A zany combination of acrobatics and miming, their act, known as “The Three Keatons,” helped him develop his life-long trademark - a never-smiling face. Following a successful stage career, Keaton entered film making in 1917. Creating some of the most elaborate gags in silent film history, his movies were both harrowing and hilarious - usually centering on his collision with natural disasters and mechanical monsters. But whatever befell him, Keaton’s classic deadpan character “The Great Stone Face” never showed fear or alarm. A writer, director, and actor, he produced and starred in 19 short films and 10 full-length features, including such masterpieces as The Navigator (1924), The General (1926), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).

 

Source: USPS Archives