Bust A Keaton... "The Great Stone Face"

"I have called Keaton the most silent of silent film comedians without quite explaining why. The silence was related to another deeply rooted quality -- that immobility, that sense of alert repose, we have so often seen in him. Keaton could run like a jackrabbit and, in almost every feature film, he did. He could stunt like Lloyd, as honestly and even more dangerously. His pictures are motion pictures. Yet, though there is a hurricane eternally raging around him, and though he is often caught up in it, Keaton's constant drift is toward the quiet at the hurricane's eye."
-- Walter Kerr,The Silent Clowns

Popular legend has it that one day before a vaudeville performance, a very young Keaton was walking down a flight of stairs, but tripped and fell down the entire flight and broke his nose. Keaton got right back up, and upon seeing this the famous magician Harry Houdini, who was in the performance, said to Keaton's mother that he was quite the little buster. It is more likely, however, that the nickname was given by a fellow vaudvillian, whose name has been lost to history. Although Houdini did tour with the Keatons, he did not join up with them until Keaton was well beyond infancy. Regardless of the source, however, the name 'Buster' was acquired in his youth, and used ever since.

-- from Wikipedia