Max Linder

Although all too frequently neglected by fans of silent comedy Max Linder is in many ways as important a figure as Charles Chaplin Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd not least because he predated and influenced them all by several years and was largely responsible for the creation of the classic style of silent slapstick comedy He started out as an actor in the French theatre but after making his screen debut in 1905 he quickly became an enormously famous and successful film comedian on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to his character Max a tophatted dandy By 1912 he was the highestpaid film star in the world with an unprecedented salary of one million francs He began to direct films in 1911 and showed equal facility behind the camera but his career suffered an almost terminal blow when he was called up to fight in World War I He was gassed and the illness that resulted would blight his career Although offered a contract in America recurring illhealth meant that his US films had little of the sparkle of his early French work and a brief attempt to revive his career by making films for the recentlyformed United Artists one of whose founders of course was Chaplin in the early 1920s came to little although these later films are now regarded as classics He returned to France and killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925