Charlie Chaplin
British actor, director, writer, and composer
byname of Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin
born April 16, 1889, London, England
died December 25, 1977, Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland
British comedian, producer, writer, director, and composer who is widely
regarded as the greatest comic artist of the screen and one of the most
important figures in motion-picture history.
Named after his father, a British music hall entertainer, Chaplin spent
his early childhood with his mother, the singer Hannah Hall. He made his
own stage debut at age five, filling in when his mother lost her voice
in mid-song. The mentally unstable Hall was later confined to an asylum,
whereupon Charlie and his half-brother Sydney were sent to a series of
bleak workhouses and residential schools. Using his mother’s
show-business contacts, Charlie became a professional entertainer in
1897 when he joined the Eight Lancashire Lads, a clog-dancing act. His
subsequent stage credits included a small role in William Gillette’s
Sherlock Holmes and a stint with the vaudeville act Casey’s Court
Circus. In 1908 he joined the Fred Karno pantomime troupe, quickly
rising to star status as The Drunk in the ensemble sketch A Night in an
English Music Hall.
While touring America with the Karno
company in 1913, Chaplin was signed to appear in Mack Sennett’s Keystone
comedy films. Though his first Keystone one-reeler, Making a Living
(1914), was not the failure that historians have claimed, Chaplin’s
initial screen character, a mercenary dandy, did not show him to best
advantage. Ordered by Sennett to come up with a more workable screen
image, Chaplin improvised an outfit consisting of a too-small coat,
too-large pants, floppy shoes, and a battered derby. As a finishing
touch, he pasted on a postage-stamp mustache and adopted a cane as an
all-purpose prop. It was in his second Keystone film, Kid Auto Races at
Venice (1914), that Chaplin’s immortal screen alter ego, “the Little
Tramp,” was born.
In truth, Chaplin did not always
portray a tramp; in many of his films his character was employed as a
waiter, store clerk, stagehand, fireman, and the like. His character
might be better described as the quintessential misfit: shunned by
polite society, unlucky in love, jack-of-all-trades but master of none.
He was also a survivor, forever leaving past sorrows behind, jauntily
shuffling off to new adventures. The Tramp’s appeal was universal:
audiences loved his cheekiness, his deflation of pomposity, his casual
savagery, his unexpected gallantry, and his resilience in the face of
adversity. Some historians have traced the Tramp’s origins to Chaplin’s
Dickensian childhood, while others have suggested that the character had
its roots in the motto of Chaplin’s mentor, Fred Karno: “Keep it
wistful, gentlemen, keep it wistful.” Whatever the case, within months
after his movie debut, Chaplin was the screen’s biggest star.
His 35 Keystone comedies can be
regarded as the Tramp’s gestation period, during which a caricature
became a character. The films improved steadily once Chaplin became his
own director. In 1915 he left Sennett to accept a $1,250-weekly contract
at Essanay Studios. It was there that he began to inject elements of
pathos in his comedy, notably in such shorts as The Tramp (1915) and
Burlesque on Carmen (1916). He moved on to an even more lucrative job
($670,000 per year) at the Mutual Company Film Corporation. There,
during an 18-month period, he made the 12 two-reelers that many regard
as his finest films, among them such gems as One A.M. (1916), The Rink
(1916), The Vagabond (1916), and Easy Street (1917).
While working for First National
Pictures (1918–19), Chaplin made the three-reel Shoulder Arms (1918),
the four-reel The Pilgrim (1923), and his first starring feature, The
Kid (1921). Some have suggested that the increased dramatic content of
these films is symptomatic of Chaplin’s efforts to justify the praise
lavished upon him by the critical intelligentsia. A painstaking
perfectionist, he began spending more and more time on the preparation
and production of each film. From 1923 through 1929 he issued only three
features: A Woman of Paris (1923), which he directed but did not star
in; The Gold Rush (1925), widely regarded as his masterpiece; and The
Circus (1928), an underrated film that may rank as his funniest. All
three were released by United Artists, the company cofounded in 1919 by
Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith.
As the Little Tramp, Chaplin had
mastered the subtle art of pantomime, and the advent of sound gave him
cause for alarm. After much hesitation, he released his 1931 feature
City Lights as a silent, despite the ubiquity of talkies after 1928; his
gamble paid off, and the film was a success. His next film, Modern Times
(1936), was a hybrid, essentially a silent with music, sound effects,
and brief passages of dialogue. In this film Chaplin gave his Little
Tramp a voice, as he performed a gibberish song; perhaps significantly,
it was the character’s farewell to the screen. Chaplin’s first full
talkie was The Great Dictator (1940), a devastating lampoon of Adolf
Hitler that proved to be the comedian’s most profitable film.
Throughout his career, Chaplin’s
offscreen activities had stirred up controversy. In 1918 he married
16-year-old Mildred Harris, and in 1924 he wed another teenager, Lita
Grey; both marriages ended in divorce. His third marriage, to actress
Paulette Goddard, was clouded by rumours that their union, which lasted
until 1942, had never been legalized; and in 1943 he was the target of a
paternity suit. When he began lobbying for a Second Front in Russia
during World War II, his detractors alleged that he was a communist
sympathizer. His 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux, which argued that an
individual murderer was an “amateur” compared with the warmongers of the
world, further provoked his enemies.
En route to the London premiere of his
last American film, Limelight (1952), Chaplin learned that he would be
denied a reentry visa to the United States. The embittered filmmaker
moved to Switzerland with his fourth wife, Oona (daughter of playwright
Eugene O’Neill), and their children; his next film, made in England, was
A King in New York (1957), in which an exiled monarch watches helplessly
as his world crumbles. In 1964 Chaplin published My Autobiography, and
two years later he directed his last film, the much-maligned A Countess
from Hong Kong. Eventually the animosity between Chaplin and the U.S.
government subsided, and in 1972 he returned to Hollywood to accept a
special Academy Award. It was a bittersweet homecoming. Chaplin had come
to deplore the United States, but he was visibly and deeply moved by the
12-minute standing ovation he received at the Oscar ceremonies. As
Alistair Cooke described the events,
He was very old and trembly and groping
through the thickening fog of memory for a few simple sentences. A
senile, harmless doll, he was now—as the song says—“easy to love,”
absolutely safe to admire.
Chaplin made one of his final public
appearances in 1975, when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Several
months after his death, his body was briefly kidnapped from a Swiss
cemetery by a pair of bungling thieves—a macabre coda that Chaplin might
have concocted for one of his own two-reelers.
Harold L. Erickson
