Leonidas F. Chaney was born in 1883 on April Fool’s Day to parents who were profoundly deaf. He not only became fluent in sign language, he also became a master at pantomime. It was a skill that would serve him later on the silent screen.

Chaney’s father, Frank, was a barber, and his mother, Emma, a teacher at the Institute for the Education of Mutes, which had been founded by her parents. It would later change its name to the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind.

But it was public monies that paid for the school. The Chaney family was poor.

In 1893, Emma became ill with inflammatory rheumatism. Lon then a fourth-grader at Lincoln Elementary School, dropped out to take care of her.

To entertain her, he would act out the day’s events. Three years later, while working as a mule-leading tour guide on Pikes Peak, he practiced his mimicry skills on tourists, who encouraged him to go into show business.

At 13, Chaney got his first break in entertainment through his older brother John, who worked as a stage manager at the Colorado Springs Opera House on Tejon Street, which today is the nightclub/restaurant Rum Bay. Lon worked props for 25 cents a night.

But acting wasn’t considered a reputable profession. Some hotels and restaurants posted signs reading: “No dogs. No actors.”

So at his father’s behest, Chaney studied home repair and took a job at Brown’s Wall Paper and Paint Company, a building that now houses The Chinook Bookshop.

When the Antlers Hotel burned down in 1899, Chaney took a job on the renovation crew. But his heart remained in show business. He would hang wallpaper by day and by night sneak off to work at the Opera House.

On April 18, 1902, he made his acting debut in “The Little Tycoon,” which he co-wrote with his brother.

The review in the Evening Gazette raved: “As the entertaining valet, Lon Chaney provoked laughter whenever he appeared on the stage and his dancing was received with loud acclamations of approval. As a comedian he is irresistible and it would be hard to find his equal in dancing among many first-class vaudeville performers.”

That was all the encouragement he needed.

For the next 11 years, he toured the Midwest with a musical-comedy troupe, performing in stores and meeting halls, a coal-oil lamp his only footlight. The troupe couldn’t afford a makeup artist, so Chaney learned to do it himself, and soon his skills with putty rivaled his acting skills.

In 1905, at 22 years old, Chaney married a 16-year-old singer, Cleva Creighton. The following year, they had a son, Creighton, who would use the stage name Lon Chaney Jr. and star in a series of horror movies as the Wolf Man.

In 1913, the Chaney family moved to California, where Chaney’s show business career flourished but his home life went through utter turmoil.

Cleva, who had established herself as a cabaret singer, began drinking heavily and having affairs. Soon after Chaney confronted her about her problems, she tried to kill herself by gulping down a corrosive poison.

She survived, but the marriage didn’t. The couple divorced in 1914, and Chaney got custody of their son.

He remarried in 1915. His second and last wife Hazel was a chorus dancer.

A couple of years earlier, Chaney got his first break in that new-fangled medium: the moving picture.

His first roles were bit parts in the 1913 films “Poor Jakes’ Demise” and “Back to Life.”

He took a variety of small roles until 1919, when he starred in “The Miracle Man,” his first movie role noticed by critics and Hollywood insiders. He played a con man who pretended he was crippled so he could steal from a faith healer.

He was officially “discovered,” and offers for leading roles started pouring in.

Throughout the next 14 years, Chaney would work like a fiend, often doing more than 20 silent films a year.

He played a legless criminal in “The Penalty,” the quintessential Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” a sympathetic Chinese outcast in “Shadows,” the lovelorn hunchback Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” a tormented clown in “He Who Gets Slapped,” an armless knife-thrower in “The Unknown,” a tough Marine sergeant in “Tell It to the Marines” and the faceless stalker in “The Phantom of the Opera.”

The “Phantom” story would be remade five times on film and become two major stage plays (one version of which concludes its run today at the Fine Arts Center). But Chaney’s film portrayal would stand out for its uncompromising picture of the phantom. Chaney’s Phantom wasn’t just some misunderstood, deformed musician. He was a true monster.

Movie fans wanted to know who was this human chameleon, a man who could play so many different parts with ease. Their curiosity would never be quenched.

Chaney was notoriously reclusive, preferring to spend free time with family and friends rather than hobnob with glitterati.

Through interviews with family members, actors and other co-workers, biographer Michael Blake uncovered several things about Chaney’s personal life.

One was that he was always close to his dad, who moved from Colorado Springs to Los Angeles after Chaney’s mother died in 1914 and lived there until his death in 1927.

Chaney was notoriously generous. He gave all his co-workers $5 or $10 gift certificates for Christmas.

He didn’t chase skirts.

But he wasn’t without vices. He was a heavy smoker, and that would lead to his early death of lung cancer in 1930 at age 47.

He was at the peak of his career. Just a year earlier, movie-theater owners voted Chaney the top male star of Hollywood. He had just completed work on his first and only talkie, “The Unholy Three,” in which he proved that his voice was as versatile as his face.

He played an old woman and a ventriloquist, and lent his voice to the ventriloquist’s dummy, a parrot and a girl.

If Chaney had lived longer, he might have been “The Man of a Thousand Voices,” in addition to being “The Man of a Thousand Faces.”