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Actor, producer, screenwriter, director, composer. Born April
16, 1889, in London, England. Chaplin was introduced early on to
performing, as both of his parents were music hall entertainers.
After a double tragedy--his mother had a nervous breakdown and
his father died when Charlie was five--he and his half-brother,
Sydney, became street urchins, in and out of charity homes.
After a time in an orphanage, Chaplin toured England with a
children’s musical troupe, the Eight Lancashire Lads, a job
which led to small roles on the London stage. At age 17, he
joined the Karno music hall revue and toured the United States.
In 1913, the film producer Mack Sennett signed him to his
Keystone Company for a salary of $150 per week. His first film
for Keystone was Making a Living (1914). In Kid Auto Races at
Venice (1914), Chaplin introduced the character who would become
his trademark, the “Little Tramp.” Complete with bowler hat,
cane, baggy pants, and too-big shoes, Chaplin would soon become
the first-ever movie star and arguably the most innovative
pioneer in movie history.
While at Keystone, Chaplin made over 20 short films in one year,
many of which he also wrote and directed. Meanwhile, he
carefully honed the character of the Tramp—despite the
appearance of spontaneity and improvisation, he worked out every
last detail of his films. By 1915, he had become such a popular
actor that he signed with the Essanay film company for $1,250
per week, plus a $10,000 signing bonus.
In his 1915 film, The Tramp, Chaplin starred for the first time
with Edna Purviance, who would play his version of an ideal
woman in every one of his films for the next eight years. In
most of his films, Chaplin performed one kind deed after another
for the sake of the women he adored, but he ultimately
understood that they could never be expected to fall in love
with a Tramp like him.
In 1916, Chaplin moved to the Mutual Film Corporation, where a
string of popular short (two-reel) films like The Pawnshop
(1916), One A.M. (1916), The Immigrant (1917), and Easy Street
(1917) made him an international star. He soon began working as
an independent filmmaker, distributing through the First
National Exhibitors Circuit, and was responsible for every
aspect of the making of the films he starred in, including
writing, directing, producing, casting, and editing. Films made
during this period included the longer, three-reel features A
Dog’s Life (1918) and Shoulder Arms (1918)—the latter set on the
battlefields of Europe—and the unprecedented six-reel The Kid
(1921), which became one of the biggest hits yet in film history
(its popularity was exceeded only by D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film,
Birth of a Nation).
In 1919, Chaplin and Griffith founded the United Artists
Corporation (UA) with Chaplin's fellow silent-screen stars Mary
Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Chaplin’s first film with UA, A
Woman of Paris (1923) was also his first full-length feature and
his last film with Purviance. He wrote and directed the film,
but appeared only briefly, as a railroad porter.
In 1925, the Little Tramp made his UA debut, in The Gold Rush,
the film Chaplin called “the picture I want to be remembered
by.” Chaplin was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 1928 for
his film The Circus.
Refusing to give in to the growing pressure to add sound to his
films, Chaplin scored another huge hit with 1931’s City Lights,
a story of the Tramp and his hopeless love for a blind flower
girl. Chaplin did set the film to music, however, and also added
sound effects. From then on, he wrote the musical scores for all
his films and added musical tracks to a number of his old silent
classics. He eventually jumped on the miraculous bandwagon of
"talkies," giving the Tramp his only talking sequence on film (a
garbled sing-song sequence) in Modern Times (1936).
Besides being a deft comic actor with an impeccable sense of
timing and a studiously straight face, Chaplin brought a
distinct take on various social and political issues to many of
his films. The Great Dictator (1940), his first full-length
talkie, combined slapstick with a sharp, satirical kind of
political commentary—Chaplin played a dual role as a Jewish
barber reminiscent of the Tramp and Adenoid Hynkel, the maniacal
Hitler-like dictator of the country of Tomania. The film also
featured Jack Oakie as Benzino Napaloni of Bacteria, a clear
send-up of Benito Mussolini. In 1947, Chaplin brought a
distinctly post-war, post-Holocaust vision to another brilliant,
socially conscious film, Monsieur Verdoux.
By the early 1950s, Chaplin’s liberal political views drew
criticism in the growing atmosphere of suspicion promulgated by
Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade. After releasing
his last great film, Limelight (1952), Chaplin—who had never
applied for U.S. citizenship—was in England when he was informed
that he might not be permitted back into the States because of
his alleged leftist views. He settled with his family in
Switzerland. Due to pronounced public anger against Chaplin, his
first European film, the gently satirical A King in New York
(1957), was not even released in America until 1973. In 1967,
Chaplin released his final film, the low-budget picture A
Countess From Hong Kong, starring Sophia Loren and Marlon
Brando.
In 1972, after 20 years, Chaplin was invited back to the United
States to receive another honorary Academy Award. Reestablished
in the public’s mind as one of the true geniuses in filmmaking
history, Chaplin was knighted in 1975 by Queen Elizabeth II.
Chaplin often drew criticism about his personal life and his
well-documented penchant for much younger women. In addition to
his four wives, Chaplin was romantically linked to a number of
other women, including the actresses Pola Negri and Louise
Brooks. Chaplin’s first marriage, to Mildred Harris, ended in
divorce in 1920 after two years. He met his second wife, Lita
Grey, when she appeared in The Kid at age 12. They married in
1924, when she was 16, and had two sons, Charles Jr. and Sydney,
before divorcing in 1927. Chaplin married the actress Paulette
Goddard in the early 1930s (the exact date is in dispute); the
couple divorced in 1942.
In 1943, another actress, Joan Barry, named Chaplin in a
paternity suit; although his denial was backed by some genetic
evidence, the court ruled in Barry’s favor. In June 1943,
Chaplin married Oona O’Neill, the 18-year-old daughter of the
playwright Eugene O’Neill. The couple had eight children and
remained together until Chaplin’s death on December 25, 1977, in
Switzerland.
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