page_title: Buster Keaton
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Buster Keaton / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: Informal portrait of Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge standing with their baby, Joseph Keaton, on the platform of a train station with a bridge in the background in Chicago, Illinois.
context_page_description: Joseph Frank Keaton, known professionally as Buster Keaton, was an American actor, comedian, film director, producer, screenwriter, and stunt performer. He is best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" on a series of films that make him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies". His career declined afterward with a loss of artistic independence when he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, his wife divorced him, and he descended into alcoholism. He recovered in the 1940s, remarried, and revived his career as an honored comic performer for the rest of his life, earning an Honorary Academy Award in 1959.
  Many of Keaton's films from the 1920s remain highly regarded, such as Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman, with The General widely viewed as his masterpiece. Among its strongest admirers was Orson Welles, who stated that The General was cinema's highest achievement in comedy, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.
context_section_description: On May 31, 1921, Keaton married Natalie Talmadge, sister of actresses Norma Talmadge and Constance Talmadge. She co-starred with him in Our Hospitality. The couple had sons Joseph, called James (June 2, 1922 – February 14, 2007), and Robert (February 3, 1924 – July 19, 2009), both of whom later took the surname Talmadge.
  After the birth of Robert, the relationship began to suffer. Talmadge decided not to have more children, and this led to the couple staying in separate bedrooms. Her financial extravagance was another factor in the breakdown of the marriage, as she would spend up to a third of his salary on clothes. Keaton dated actress Dorothy Sebastian beginning in the 1920s and Kathleen Key in the early 1930s. After attempts at reconciliation, Talmadge divorced him in 1932, taking his entire fortune and refusing to allow any contact between him and his sons. Keaton was reunited with them about a decade later when his older son turned 18.
  With the failure of his marriage and the loss of his independence as a film-maker, Keaton lapsed into a period of alcoholism. In 1926, he spent $300,000 to build a 10,000-square-foot (930 m²) home in Beverly Hills designed by architect Gene Verge Sr., which was later owned by James Mason and Cary Grant.
  Keaton was briefly institutionalized, according to the Turner Classic Movies documentary So Funny it Hurt. He escaped a straitjacket with tricks learned from Harry Houdini. In 1933, he married his nurse Mae Scriven during an alcoholic binge about which he afterwards claimed to remember nothing. Scriven claimed that she didn't know Keaton's real first name until after the marriage. She filed for divorce in 1935 after finding Keaton with Leah Clampitt Sewell, the libertine wife of millionaire Barton Sewell, in a hotel in Santa Barbara. They divorced in 1936 at great financial cost to Keaton.
  Keaton was given large amounts of alcohol and aversion therapy. He stopped drinking for five years.
  On May 29, 1940, Keaton married Eleanor Norris (July 29, 1918 – October 19, 1998), who was 23 years his junior. She has been credited with saving his life by stopping his heavy drinking and helping to salvage his career. The marriage lasted until his death. Between 1947 and 1954, they appeared regularly in the Cirque Medrano in Paris as a double act. She came to know his routines so well that she often participated in them on TV revivals.
caption: Keaton with Natalie Talmadge and Joseph in 1922
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