Max Linder

The "mirror routine," made famous in The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), was in fact first performed by Linder in Seven Years Bad Luck (1921).

First time married, in Paris, at the age of 40 (1923) to his 20-year-old bride Hélène Peters.

Although offered a contract in America, recurring ill health 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 recently-formed 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.

It was incorrectly reported that he was killed in the Battle of the Aisne in World War I and his obituary was published in the The Moving Picture World, October 10, 1914.

By 1912 he was the highest-paid 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 drafted into the French army to fight in World War I. He was gassed, and the illness that resulted would blight his career.

In 1910 he shot one comedy each week; they all revolved round the blameless bachelor Max who lives in luxury and gets into funny situations because he is after a well-behaved, pretty young lady.

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. Linder 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 top-hatted dandy.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945." Pages 671-677. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.