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Charlie Chaplin was born Charles Spencer Chaplin in London, England on 16 April 1889 and passed away in 1977. His parents,
Charles Chaplin, Sr and Hannah Hill were music hall entertainers but separated shortly after Charlie was born, leaving
Hannah to provide for her children. In 1896 when Hannah was no longer able to care for her children, Charlie and his
brother Sydney were admitted to Lambeth Workhouse and later, Hanwell School for Orphans and Destitute Children.
Charlie had already debuted in the music hall in 1894, when he had sung a song after his mother was taken hoarse. The famed actor and director, was also a composer and wrote music for many of his films. Chaplin described himself as a "hummer": he couldn't write the music down himself but hummed the music to an assistant. His most famous songs are "Smile" from the film Modern Times (1936) and the theme from Limelight (1952), but his musical activity started much earlier than that. In 1916 he formed the Charlie Chaplin Music Publishing Company and published what he described in his autobiography as "two very bad songs" called "Oh! That Cello" and "There's Always One You Can't Forget." The short-lived Charlie Chaplin Music Publishing Company published a third piece in 1916: a curious march entitled The Peace Patrol. Chaplin's sense of humor is apparent throughout the piece, especially in the quote from Brahms's Hungarian Dance no. 5. From the moment he entered movies, Charles Chaplin knew that he needed total creative autonomy in order to make the kind of comedy of which he alone was capable. This autonomy he finally achieved in 1918, when he built his own studio. Hollywood was still rural, and the studio rose up among the orange groves in the grounds of an old mansion. Disguised on the outside as an old English village street, the interior of studio was, for those times, state of the art. Chaplin celebrated his move with an amusing little documentary film, How to Make Movies, which showed the facilities and personnel of the studio, and his own daily routine. In fact the film was never completed or released; and this precious view of early Hollywood was not seen until 1959 when Chaplin included some shots in his compilation The Chaplin Revue. The films that Chaplin made in his own studio were a marked advance on any comedies previously made in Hollywood. They were generally longer - as much as 45 minutes, whereas few comedies before that time went beyond half an hour - and much more sophisticated in staging and structure. The first was A Dog’s Life, for which Chaplin found an excellent co-star, in the person of a charming mongrel dog, Scraps, whose battle for survival with the other dogs of the quarter is satirically compared with Charlie the Tramp’s own struggle for a place in society. Along with his regular leading lady Edna Purviance - playing a much-abused singer and hostess working in the seedy Green Lantern bar - Chaplin is joined for the first time by his brother Sydney, who had shared his early struggles and helped him make his way on the variety theatres on the variety theatre circuit. An excellent comedian in his own right, Sydney plays the proprietor of the coffee stall which is victim to the pilfering of Charlie and Scraps. An odd feature of A Dog’s Life is that Chaplin has abandoned his usual cane - presumably because he needed his hand free to hold the dog’s leash. The First World War was already raging when Chaplin opened his studio; and A Dog’s Life was finished in a hurry so that Chaplin could do his war effort by embarking on a tour to sell Liberty Bonds, persuading the public to buy investments that supported the war effort. His friends were nervous of his next project, a comedy about the war, which was to become Shoulder Arms. Even Chaplin himself had momentary doubts about making comedy out of such a catastrophic event in human history. Yet with this film he proved definitively that there is only the thinnest division between comedy and tragedy. With great brilliance, Chaplin depicts the horrors of life in the trenches - mud, blood, hunger, vermin, longing for home, the waterlogged trenches and the ever-imminent danger of a lethal bullet or grenade - through the distorting mirror of comedy. Few directors exerted such discipline upon themselves. His original plan was to show the little hero’s life before and after the war. In the end, though, he simplified the structure, discarding reels of wonderful comic material he had shot. Despite all the initial fears,. Shoulder Arms was and remains one of his greatest successes. And no-one appreciated his comedy of the privations of life at the front more than the very men who had themselves endured it. In 1959 Chaplin reissued A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms, slightly re-edited, in his omnibus film, The Chaplin Revue. He complemented them with a third film The Pilgrim. Made in 1922, this was Chaplin’s last film of less than normal feature length - it ran for an hour - and the last in which his leading lady was the charming Edna Purviance. The film is a gentle satire on small-town life and religion, with Chaplin as an escaped convict mistaken for the new pastor of a rural community. When the film first came out it suffered a good deal from censorship in some more puritanical states and cities of the United States. Today we have no such problems with this charming comedy and its sharp but good-hearted fun at the expense of the small hypocrisies of life In his autobiography, Chaplin recalled that making Sunnyside was “like pulling teeth”. From time to time, like any artist, Chaplin experienced creative blocks; but this was one of the worst in his career. No doubt one cause was his private life. Late in November 1918 he had married in haste a 17-year-old actress, Mildred Harris - and immediately regretted it as he found that poor Mildred was “no intellectual heavyweight” and woefully unequal to the job of wife to a genius. Barely a week after the marriage, he was back at the studio with a plan to put Charlie into a rural setting, as the put-upon man-of-all-work at a seedy country hotel. He took the unit on location to one of the ranches that were still close by in that rural California, and hired horses, cows and cowboys - but the ideas for comedy did not come. After more than three months of idleness and a temporary abandonment of the project, Chaplin suddenly forced himself into a three-week spurt of energetic activity, after which he was able to complete Sunnyside. It is a more interesting film than Chaplin or his critics gave him credit for. The spectacle of Charlie in a rural setting is novel, and provides some unexpected gags. Some scenes have a rather piquant edge of cruelty. One scene in particular is particularly remembered. Charlie, knocked unconscious, dreams that he dances with four wood-nymphs. This virtuoso performance is clearly a tribute to the ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune, created and performed by the great Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinski. Nijinski had visited Chaplin’s studio and the two men clearly had a great mutual admiration. Chaplin was understandably flattered when the Russian dancer and his colleagues complimented him on his own dancing skills. A Day’s Pleasure unusually shows Chaplin as the respectable father of a family and the proud owner of a Model-T Ford. This is another film whose light touch conceals the difficulties of its making. Chaplin started out with the simple idea of the story of the hazards of a family excursion; but at first the shooting went slowly. His marital troubles continued to distract him; and reached a crisis when his wife gave birth to a severely handicapped baby which died at two days old. Paradoxically, Chaplin seemed suddenly inspired. A Day’s Pleasure (still known by its working title of Charlie’s Picnic), was abandoned, and work began feverishly on what was to be his masterpiece The Kid. Finally it was the impatience of the distribution company, desperate for a new Chaplin film, which led him to finish shooting A Day’s Pleasure in little more than a week. He rented a pleasure boat, which was the kind of prop that always inspired him; and it is probably the speed at which the film was finally finished that gives it its lasting freshness. Chaplin was experimenting with new roles for his Tramp character. In The Idle Class (1921) he actually plays two roles - the Tramp and a rich young alcoholic husband. Between them they represent the Idle Rich and the Idle Poor . Everyone in the film is obsessed with America’s dominating passion of the time - the game of golf - and Chaplin has the opportunity for a gag-filled golfing sequence, the prototype for which he had made and abandoned five years before, during his Mutual years. Pay Day (1922) was Chaplin’s last two-reeler, and again casts him in an unfamiliar role, as a working man and hen-pecked husband. It proved one of his most trouble-free productions and shooting was completed in one month. Like his earlier two-reelers it is divided into distinct “acts”. In the first part he is seen as a workman on a building site (it was actually shot on location on a new building in construction close to the studio) having trouble with bricks, the tools of his trade, and an elevator which at least has a convenient habit of delivering other people’s food to him. The second “act” shows the workman on a night out and gives Chaplin the possibility for a drunk act of the kind that had brought him fame in the English music halls of his youth. In the finale, he has to return home in the small hours of the morning to his virago wife, played by the veteran expert in such roles, Phyllis Allen. The film is particularly notable for the expertly shot night scenes of the second act. Text by David Robinson / Copyright 2004 MK2 SA 1903-1906 Performs in Sherlock Holmes, as the newspaper boy Billy 1906-1907 The Casey Circus 1907-1910 Works with the Karno Pantomime Troupe 1910-1912 First tour of USA/Canada with Karno Troupe 1912-1913 Second tour of USA/Canada with Karno Troupe May 1913 Accepts offer from Adam Kessel (who has interests in the Keystone Film Company) for $125/week 29 December 1913 Signs contract with Keystone Jan/Feb 1914 Charlie Chaplin's first film: Making a Living FILMOGRAPHY OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN KEYSTONE FILMS ($1,250/week to make 14 films during 1915 ) Feltham once said, "Laughter should dimple the cheek, not furrow the brow." Charlie Chaplin was a man who definitely
dimpled millions of cheeks in the early 1900's. He had a huge impact on the lives of Americans during the world wars and
the hard times of the Depression and he made people laugh for the first time in a long time and changed the way they looked
at the world despite his own troubles. And even though his films were in black and white, he put a lot of color into everyone's
life.
Charlie Chaplin was born on April 15, 1889, in London, England to Charles Chaplin, Sr., and Hannah Hill(Lynn, Kenneth, pg.376). He was taught to sing before he could talk and danced just as soon as he could walk(Untermeyer, Louis, pg.669). At a very young age Chaplin was told that he would be the most famous person in the world. From then on it was a personal goal for little Charlie. And he would do anything to reach his goal. When Charlie was five years old he sang for his mother on stage after she became ill and taken hoarse(Pringle, Glen). Everyone in the audience loved him and hurled their money onto the stage. When Chaplin was eight, he appeared in a clog dancing act called "Eight Lancashire Lads"(A.Kn, pg.94) Once again he was loved by the audience and he was excited with the attention he received. Charlie's half-brother , Sidney, acted as his agent and when Charlie was ten years old, Sidney got Chaplin an engagement at the London Hippodrome. Within a few years Charlie was one of the most popular child actors in England (Untermeyer, Louis, pg. 670). Charlie was twelve when his father died on May 9th, 1901. He died in St. Thomas Hospital in London of alcoholism. He was thirty-seven (Robinson, David, pg. 648). After the death of her husband, Charlie's mother, became a chronically psychotic woman who was in and out of mental institutions(Weissman, Stephen, pg. 6). Charlie and Sidney, were placed in a charity home after their mother's mental health plummeted. Chaplin attended 2 years of school at Hern Boy's College. This was the only formal education that he ever recieved. Charlie was at school when his mother suffered a mental breakdown and was taken away to an institution. Completely alone, Charlie lived on the streets. When she was well enough, his mother took the children back and supported them by sewing(Untermeyer, Louis, pg.670). Between his twelfth and his fourteenth birthdays, Charlie's places of employment included a barbershop ( where he absorbed the techniques that the Jewish barber would display in "The Great Dictator"); a stationery store, a doctor's office, a glass factory, Chandler's shop, and a printing plant (Lynn, Kenneth S., pg.65). From 1903 to 1906, Charlie performed in "Sherlock Holmes" as the paperboy, Billy(Pringle, Glen). After his time with "Sherlock Holmes", Charlie joined "The Casey Circus" in 1906 as a mime. He remained there for a year(Pringle, Glen). As a gawky adolescent whose voice was changing, Charlie found that he could not remain a child actor in the legimate theater and was forced back into Vaudeville where he discovered the gift for comic pantomime. After remaining in Vaudeville for a few years, Charlie, not quite twenty, came to the United States as a top comedian( Untermeyer, Louis, pg.670). There he started his career as the most famous person that ever lived. In 1907, Chaplin joined the Karno Pantomime Troupe. He made his first tour of the United States and Canada in 1910 with the Karno Troupe. He stayed with the Karno Troupe until 1913. In May of 1913, Charlie signed a contract with Adam Kessel, who had an interest in the Keystone Film Company, for $125 per week. On December 29, 1913, Chaplin signed with Keystone Films for $150 a week. In January of 1914, Chaplin made his first feature film, "Making A Living". Charlie remained with Keystone Films all through 1914 until November when he signed a contract with Essanay Films for $1,250 a week to make 14 films during the year of 1915 (Pringle, Glen). In the spring of 1915, Chaplin made his first appearance as the "tramp" character in "The Tramp". The film was a bittersweet comedy with a signature ending in which - plucky and resilient after losing in love - this homeless comic hero waddles down life's highway, desolate and utterly alone ( Weissman, Stephen). His character, the Tramp, was a short, twitchy man with a black mustache, baggy suit and a waddling penguinlike walk(Corn, Kahana, pg13). A biographist, Theodore Huff, believed Chaplin's costume for the Tramp character personified shabby gentility- the fallen aristocrat at grips with poverty. He said the cane was a symbol of attempted dignity. And he thought his mustache was a sign of vanity (Untermeyer, Louis, pg.671). Within two years of his first appearance in motion pictures, in 1914, he had become one of the best known personalities in the nation (A.Kn., pg. 93). On the 27th of February, 1916, Chaplin signed with Mutual Films for $10,000 a week plus a $150,000 signing bonus(Pringle, Glen). He remained with for a little over a year, until June 17, 1917, when he signed with First National Exhibitor's Circuit for $1,075,000 a year( Pringle, Glen). He was still a bachelor - handsome, rich, and famous - when he became infatuated with a sixteen- year-old movie ingenue, Mildred Harris. On October 23rd, 1918, they were suddenly married (Untermeyer, Louis pg.672). By the early 1920's his box office appeal was so great that no studio could afford his talents, and he appeared only in films produced by himself. Chaplin, together with two other of the foremost stars of the day, Mary Pickford , Douglas Fairbanks (who was Chaplin's best friend) and the director D.W. Griffith formed United Artists, so that each could produce and distribute his own films independently (A.Kn, pg.94). He demanded unquestioning obedience from his associates; years of instant deference to his point of view had persuaded him that it was the only one that mattered. Chaplin's most famous films that brought him the most admiration, and controversy were: "The Kid"(1920), "The Gold Rush"(1925), "City Lights"(1931), "Modern Times"(1936), "The Great Dictator"(1940), "Monsieur Verdoux"(1947), and "Limelight"(1952) (1998 World Book, pg.377). After these films Chaplin filled the sky as the most famous person in the world. Until he was nearly thirty Chaplin's life had been quiet, scandal-free and without any serious involvement. Then, "Talkies" started coming out. These are movies with sound. "Talkies are spoiling the oldest art in the world- the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence. They are defeating the meaning of the screen." Charlie Chaplin said when the talking movies came out. Forty years after he came to America , Chaplin was accused of being a communist. He had no answer to prove the accusations wrong except that it was his constitutional right, and with Senator McCarthy on the loose that wasn't enough. Charlie had come to America, that forty years ago, to breathe free air. Now he was leaving for the same reason (James, Clive, pg 137). After finding out that Chaplin was "sympathetic with the Leftist beliefs", the FBI went to work to find out what was going on. The extensive files on Chaplin maintained by the FBI over a period of more than fifty years. They total more than nineteen hundred pages. Not only was he accused of being a communist, he was also accused of being Jewish, as well, because his half-brother, Sidney, was three-fourths Jewish. Chaplin's reputation was not good with the FBI. Charlie's investigation began on August 15, 1922, when an agent called A.A. Hopkins passed on the information to the FBI that Charlie had given a reception for a prominent labor leader, William Z. Foster, who was visiting Los Angeles (Robinson, David, pg. 751). He was also frequently the guest of the millionaire D.C. James at his cliffside mansion in Carmel. It was there that he came to delight with his host's son, Dan, a would be writer and a communist whom he later would employ as an assistant director on "The Great Dictator". After being questioned about being a communist, Chaplin answered, "I do not want to create any revolution, all I want to do is create a few more films. I might amuse people. I hope so." (Robinson, David, pg.752) The FBI interviewed scores of witnesses, and the secret evidence they collected fills more than four hundred pages. On January 15th, 1927, Chaplin suffered a serious nervous breakdown. Three days after that, the broken comedian learned from a story in the New York Times that the U.S. Government was about to lien on his assets. In 1933 the impromptu performances stopped. Instead, Chaplin's dark moods became more obvious, and his anger flashes more constant. A fear of failure was plaguing him. The secret to Chaplin's fortitude in weathering the storms of the late 1940's was the unqualified success and happiness of his marriage to Oona. In 1947, after the film, "Monsieur Verdoux", he returned to California on April 30th, but for the next six weeks he stayed away from the studio. He was lonely, dispirited, and give to expressing dissatisfaction with his achievements. One of the FBI's most helpful informants was the beautiful, young actress, Hedda Hopper (Robinson, David, pg.752). The FBI seemed to have bugged telephones and hotel rooms with devices they called "Microphone Technicals." They put stops on border posts to prevent Chaplin's leaving the country if he had been so inclined. Finally in November of 1948, Chaplin was put on the Security Index. He was accused of all those things and no one had proof or any evidence whatsoever. The files were disappointing; on the 29th of December, there came the admission: " It has been determined that there are no witnesses available who could offer testimony that Chaplin has been a member of the communist party in the past, is now a member, or has contributed funds to the communist party." (Robinson, David, pg. 754) Finally, the FBI admitted that they had no evidence to support the beliefs that Chaplin was a communist. On the 25th of August, 1952, Mr. Noto of the Immigration and Naturalization service telephoned the FBI to say that was intending to sail for England in September. Attorney General McGranery, on September 9th, met with J. Edgar Hoover and, nervous and paranoid, told him that he was considering taking steps to prevent the re-entry into this country of Chaplin. Later that day, McGranery announced that Chaplin's re-entry permit would not be honored. On the 16th of September, Hoover told the Los Angeles office that Chaplin had been reissued a re-entry permit, and that they should advise head office on any information. At the bottom of the note it read- "INS has advised that even though he was given a re-entry permit, this permit gives no guarantee he will be aloud to return to the United States." The FBI files show, however, that the Immigration and Naturalization service remained nervous about their permission. Chaplin, instead of coming back, turned in his re-entry permit and chose to make his home in Europe ( Robinson, David, pg.755). Charlie made his way back to Europe, where he made his home in Switzerland. He said he was happiest there, far away from the fame and misfortune, and with his wife, Oona, and children. And after three disastrous marriages, a succession of love affairs and the FBI's accusations that weren't true, Chaplin felt happy for the first time in a long time. In 1957, he produced, in London, "The King in New York", a comedy laden with sermons against the House Committee on un-American activities, inane TV commercials, and other aspects of American life. This film brought back fresh accusations of pro-communism, which Chaplin specifically denied (A.Kn, pg.94). In 1972, Chaplin was honored at the Academy Awards as a wonderful comedian, actor and loving person. It was his first time back to America since the Red Scare accusations about him, and once again the huge crowd of people and fellow actors, producers and directors loved him, and he felt the love that he had always had of laughter and attention. In 1977, on the 25th of December (Christmas Day), Chaplin passed away of natural causes in his home in Corsier-Sur-Vevey, Switzerland. He was eighty-eight years old (McIntyre, Diane, para.1). He was married to Oona Chaplin at the time, who was his wife for thirty six years. Even among false accusations and the troubled loves and marriages he went through, Charlie Chaplin, had an impact on everyone's life in the early 1900's. He made more people laugh than any other man who ever lived and changed the way people looked at the world. His films were for the underdog, and with great pity and understanding, his films were about him. |