It’s hard to believe that the gentle and grandfatherly Gunnar Hansen was at one time the most fearsome screen icon around. In 1974, the Iceland native starred in Tobe Hooper’s super-efficient and now-legendary horror film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as the hulking killer Leatherface, a homicidal simpleton who dispatched his victims with a motorized blade and wore a mask made from human skin. It’s also hard to believe that someone would be so bold as to impersonate the 61-year-old actor in such a big way – by creating a Myspace page and pretending to be the actor.

“If any of you have seen the MySpace ‘Gunner Hansen’ page,” the actor noted in an email to friends last week, “please know that this site is a fraud. I do not have a MySpace page. I never have had one and never will. If you contacted me through that site, you were not talking to me.”

The fake page looked credible enough, with a headshot and bio (pilfered from Hansen’s legitimate site, GunnarHansen.com), and enabled the perpetrator of the fraud – who actually spelled Hansen’s first name wrong – access to some of Hansen’s real-world contacts. The chicanery has since been stopped by Myspace, with visitors to the phony profile getting the “Invalid Friend ID” page that is the shame of all Myspace cast-outs.••• –Robert Newton