Trading Faces

When it comes to a change of face, look no further than "The Phantom of the Opera," the oft-told tragedy of Erik, the masked opera house lurker who tutors and falls obsessively in love with a fledgling soprano. In the original 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux, Erik was deformed from birth, a condition abided by the 1925 silent classic starring Lon Chaney, nicknamed "The Man of a Thousand  Faces."

The famed unmasking scene in 1925's "The Phantom of the Opera"
was said to have made some theatergoers scream and faint.

Later film versions had the Phantom's face disfigured by acid or fire or a combination of both. Universal Pictures, the monster factory that distributed "Frankenstein," "Dracula," "The Mummy," and "The Wolf Man," cast Claude Rains (the star of Universal's "The Invisible Man") as Erique, a victimized composer of a stolen concerto whose face is marred by etching acid, in 1943's "Phantom of the Opera."

Claude Rains' "Phantom" before and after

Hammer Film Productions, Britain's house of horrors noted for frequently teaming Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in a series of "Dracula" pictures, cast Herbert Lom, best known as the long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus in Peter Sellers' "Pink Panther" comedies, in 1962's "The Phantom of the Opera" as the title character, aka Professor Petrie, an aspiring composer who tried to extinguish a fire at the printers and was accidentally splashed with nitric acid.

Herbert Lom as the "Phantom" before and after

The story of "The Phantom of the Opera" was updated for the gory 1989 version with Robert Englund (best known as Freddy Krueger in the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise) as Erik, a composer who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for people loving him for his music. The Devil subsequently disfigures Erik so that only his music will be what he is loved for.

Robert Englund's "Phantom" before and after

"The Phantom of the Opera" has led to at least six major motion picture versions, seven if you want to count Brian De Palma's "Phantom of the Paradise" from 1974 (pictured below).

Cult movie actor William Finley as the rock opera
"Phantom," disfigured in a vinyl record press.

It's not phantoms we're stirring up in the Moviehouse, but the topic remains a change of face with the stories of three actors whose careers were shaped by the shape of their faces.


Punch-Drunk

Set for a November 30 release, "Tiger" is based on the true story of Pardeep Singh Nagra, a Canadian Sikh and Ontario flyweight amateur boxing champion who was banned from competing in the nationals because he refused to shave his beard. For Sikhs, Kesh is the practice of allowing one's hair to grow freely out of respect for the perfection of God's creation. Nagra (pictured below) sought legal redress to allow followers of the Sikh faith to fight with their facial hair intact. Today, Sikh boxers in Canada are allowed in the ring with beards, but this isn't the case internationally, which is something Nagra continues to fight for, explaining, "Human rights are always worth it."

Prem Singh, who also co-wrote the screenplay, stars as Nagra in "Tiger," with Mickey Rourke as the boxer's mentor, Frank Donovan. The picture was actually shot in 2015, but that doesn't lessen the shock of seeing Mickey Rourke in full makeup as the rough-hewn coach. Of course, the actor's long track record of cosmetic surgeries, some of which he freely admits was botched, has been much publicized, but could this puffy, malformed glob be the same the sweet-faced charmer of "Diner," "Rumble Fish," and "The Pope of Greenwich Village"?

Mickey Rourke is virtually unrecognizable in "Tiger."

Starting at age 12, Mickey Rourke boxed as an amateur, from 1964 to 1973, with 27 wins (17 by knockout) and three defeats. He made his acting debut in 1979 as a member of Dan Aykroyd's tank crew in Steven Spielberg's "1941."

Walter Olkewicz, John Candy, and Mickey Rourke are caught
on the set of "1941."

When he felt he was self-destructing and thought his acting career was in the crapper, particularly after 1991's "Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man," a combo buddy biker-crime caper picture costarring Don Johnson, Mickey Rourke decided to revitalize himself by returning to the boxing ring professionally.

Mickey Rourke stretches in his corner
in this photograph from 1991.

From 1991 to 1994, he was undefeated in eight fights, but he had suffered several injuries, including a broken nose, ribs, and toe, a split tongue, and a compressed cheekbone. He also dealt with short term memory loss. Repeated punches to his face led him to plastic surgeons. The son of an amateur body builder, Rourke asserted the operations were done to fix his boxing injuries. "Most of it was to mend the mess of my face," he said, "but I went to the wrong guy to put my face back together. I had to have cartilage taken from my ear to rebuild my nose and a couple of operations to scrape out the cartilage because the scar tissue wasn't healing properly."

In 1996, two years after retiring from the ring, Rourke's spokesperson said he needed a nose job because he was having difficulty breathing. In 1999, Rourke's plastic surgeon said he needed to fix callus formations in Mickey's cheekbones, the site of toughened skin caused by boxing.

At the premiere of 1997's "The Rainmaker," directed
by Francis Ford Coppola, Mickey Rourke still has a
glimmer of his babyfaced bad boy beginnings.

When he again devoted himself to acting, he found himself cast as villains or misfits, possibly inspired by the visible outcomes of countless hours of cosmetic surgery. His part as a menacing bookie in Vincent Gallo's 1998 movie "Buffalo '66" (pictured below) set the tone for a series of hefty character roles, people with hardened, lived-in faces as if to match their seedy environs.

By 2000, Rourke's face took on the unnatural, plasticky sheen of overboard cosmetic work, while his lips were pumped up several sizes. Three years later, his eyes, once his most sparkling asset, got lost in the midst of scar tissue. In October 2017, he had yet another rhinoplasty and was proud enough to go viral with a picture of him shaking his surgeon's hand.

Accompanying the picture, Mickey wrote, "Now I am pretty again." We couldn't help but think of the line in "Raging Bull" after Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) brutalizes handsome opponent Tony Janiro and trainer Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto, best known as Coach on "Cheers") says, "He ain't pretty no more" (pictured below).

Spotting 65-year-old Rourke on a stroll in Los Angeles with a hairdresser friend in December of last year (pictured below), the British newspaper Daily Express observed, "Sporting suspicious silver hair and clothes more suited to a man at least four decades younger, his face was a peculiar mash-up - eyes out of alignment, sunken rubbery cheeks...Experts say he has also had a facelift, eyelid surgery to both upper and lower lids, soft tissue fillers, cheek and chin implants."

Here's our thing: Mickey Rourke had only eight professional bouts, and he ends up looking like Mr. Potato Head...

...while Muhammad Ali had 61 pro fights and, until his final months up to his death in June 2016, still cut a handsome profile, without a litany of plastic surgeries.

Pictured here in 2006, Muhammad Ali followed his February 25,
1964 victory over Sonny Liston by a TKO by proclaiming,
"I'm the prettiest thing that ever lived!"

Ali once calculated he took 29.000 punches. After painstaking research, Jonathan Eig, author of the recently published Ali: A Life, determined the boxer was hit "about 200,000 times," roughly half of which were blows to the head. Of course, while the punches weren't permanently damaging cosmetically, they wreaked havoc on his neurological system, resulting in Parkinson's syndrome.

The ironic thing about Mickey Rourke is that in the 1989 neo noir "Johnny Handsome," he played a horribly disfigured thief who reluctantly volunteers to be a guinea pig in a series of experimental reconstructive surgeries that leave him unrecognizably good-looking (pictured below). Directed by Walter Hill ("48 HRS."), the film featured Ellen Barkin, Elizabeth McGovern, Morgan Freeman, Forest Whitaker, Lance Henriksen, and Scott Wilson.

 

Brute Face

Sadly, one actor's striking deformed features weren't the result of botched cosmetic surgery but rather the effects of acromegaly, a syndrome caused by a disorder of the pituitary gland, which produces an excess of growth hormone. Initial symptoms are enlargement of the hands and feet, possibly accompanied by enlargement of the nose, jaw and forehead as well.

Actor Rondo Hatton's life started relatively normal. Born in Maryland in 1894, he eventually moved with his family to Florida, where he excelled in high school track and football. A popular student, he was voted "Handsomest Boy" in his senior year class (pictured below).

After joining the Florida National Guard, Hatton served in General "Black Jack" Pershing's Pancho Villa Expedition, pursuing the Mexican Revolutionary leader in the so-called Border War. During this campaign, George S. Patton, serving as Pershing's personal aide, first brandished his trademark ivory-handled Colt revolver. During World War II, Hatton saw action in France, where he was exposed to poisonous mustard gas. He was hospitalized with a lung injury before receiving a medical discharge from service.

Hatton had continued his pre-war job as a sportswriter for the Tampa Tribune when the symptoms of acromegaly first developed. In a gradual, consistent manner, the syndrome distended the shape of his head, face, and extremities. Hatton's disfigurement probably precipitated his first divorce, but it also attracted the attention of director Henry King, who was in Tampa shooting a melodrama titled "Hell Harbor," starring Lupe "The Mexican Spitfire" Vélez. King cast Hatton as a dancehall bouncer (pictured below). Hatton had already performed a bit part as a slave in the 1927 silent film version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which was shot in Mississippi and Arkansas.

Hatton continued to work at the newspaper until 1936, when he moved to Hollywood. For several years he had uncredited roles in a number of pictures, including a bit as a contestant in an "ugly man" competition who loses to a heavily made-up Charles Laughton's Quasimodo in 1939's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." He also appeared as a member of the lynch mob in the 1943 western "The Ox-Bow Incident" (pictured below), starring Henry Fonda.

Rondo Hatton looms ominously in the background.

Hatton's breakthrough role was a back-breaking killer called "The Creeper" in the 1944 Sherlock Holmes mystery "The Pearl of Death," starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

The studio, Universal Pictures, exploited Hatton's unusual features in a campaign to promote him to horror movie star status, like Bela Lugosi in "Dracula," Boris Karloff in "Frankenstein," and Lon Chaney Jr. in "The Wolf Man." The studio's publicity department incorrectly attributed the actor's disorder to his exposure to mustard gas overseas.

Rondo Hatton played "The Creeper" in two more pictures before his death from a heart attack (a direct result of his condition) in early February 1946 at age 51. Both movies, "House of Horrors" and "The Brute Man," were released after his passing. His presence in those two films guaranteed his elevation to movie cult icon, albeit posthumously.

Beginning in 2002, the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards have honored horror movies, television shows, and documentaries, as well as horror fanzines, conventions, toys, models, and collectibles. The award, a bust of Hatton, was inspired by a scene in "House of Horrors" (pictured below), which depicts demented sculptor Martin Kosleck dispatching "The Creeper " to kill his critics.

Totaled

Markedly handsome, Montgomery Clift was a successful leading man in 1940's Hollywood noted for, in the words of The New York Times, his portrayals of "moody, sensitive young men," One of the original Method actors in movies, along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, Clift was also one of the first actors to be invited to study at the Actors Studio.

Montomery Clift revolutionized the star-studio establishment when
he didn't sign a contract after arriving in Hollywood until his first
two pictures, 1948's "The Search" and that same year's "Red River,"
starring John Wayne, proved successful.

On a May evening in 1956, in the midst of production on "Raintree County," a romantic drama set in the Civil War, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Eva Marie Saint, Clift left a dinner party at the Beverly Hills home of close friend Taylor and her then-husband, producer Michael Wilding. Falling asleep at the wheel, Clift crashed his Chevrolet into either a tree or a telephone pole (accounts vary). Montgomery's friend, actor Kevin McCarthy, witnessed the accident and alerted Taylor, who rushed to the injured actor's side. She pulled a tooth lodged in his tongue that he had been choking on.

Clift suffered a broken jaw and nose, as well as a fractured sinus, along with facial lacerations that required plastic surgery. After a two-month recovery, he returned to the set of "Raintree County." Despite the remarkable results of the cosmetic surgery for the time, there were evident changes in his face, especially the left side which was practically immobile. Clift correctly predicted the movie would be a hit because audiences would flock to see his before-and-after face.

Montgomery Clift before and after the smash-up

Suffering from pain after the accident, Clift developed a dependency on pills and alcohol. His health and appearance declined steadily thereon, as he never fully recovering physically or mentally from the wreck. Acting teacher Robert Lewis described Clift's post-accident career as the "longest suicide in Hollywood history."

Nevertheless, Montgomery continued to act over the next decade, with notable roles in "The Young Lions," a World War II drama costarring Marlon Brando and Dean Martin, Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly, Last Summer," with Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, and director John Huston's "The Misfits," which was the final film for Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. During production, Marilyn, who had emotional and substance abuse issues of her own, famously described Clift as "the only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am."

Clark Gable, Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach, and Montgomery Clift cheer
on Marilyn Monroe in the famed paddle ball scene in "The Misfits."

Clift was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for his 12-minute role in 1961's "Judgment at Nuremberg" as a mentally disabled man who had been subjected to the Nazi sterilization program. At this stage a wreck, Clift had difficulty remembering his few lines, until director Stanley Kramer said, "Just forget the damn lines," encouraging him to "ad lib something." Kramer later said, "He wasn't always close to the script, but whatever he said fitted in perfectly, and he came through with as good a performance as I had hoped."

Looking far older than his 41 years, Montgomery Clift effectively
conveys confusion and anguish in "Judgment at Nuremberg."

By the time Clift starred in director John Huston's "Freud: The Secret Passion" in 1962, his self-destructive lifestyle and erratic behavior led to so many absences that the studio sued him for driving the film over budget. Branded an unreliable troublemaker, he was virtually ignored by moviemakers for four years before making his last motion picture, 1966's "The Defector," a moody political thriller costarring Roddy McDowall. Less than three months after shooting was completed, Montgomery Clift succumbed to a heart attack. He was 45.