Charlie Chaplin (April 16, 1889, probably in London, and died on December 25, 1977, in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland) was a British actor, director, screenwriter, editor, composer, film producer, and comedian. Chaplin is the first world star in cinema and one of the most influential comedians in film history. His most famous role is that of the ” hitchhiker “.
The invented by him figure with a two-finger mustache (also Toothbrush mustache called), oversized pants and shoes, tight jacket, bamboo stick in his hand, and small watermelon on his head, with the manners and dignity of a gentleman, became a film icon.
His films were characterized by the close connection between slapstick comedy and serious to tragic elements. The American Film Institute chose Chaplin at number 10 of the greatest male American film legends. He started his career as a child with appearances in the Music Hall.
He soon enjoyed great success as a comedian in the early silent film comedies. As the most popular silent film comedian of his time, he developed artistic and financial independence. In 1919 he founded the film company United Artists together with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and David Wark Griffith.
Charlie Chaplin was one of the founding fathers of the American film industry – the so-called Hollywood dream factory. Closeness to communism was suspected after a stay abroad in 1952 during the McCarthy era denied return to the U.S.
He continued his work as an actor and director in Europe. In 1972 he received his second honorary Oscar: he received the first for his work in the film The Circus in 1929 and the second for his life’s work. In 1973 he received the first “real” Oscar for the best film music on the limelight.
Early life
Charlie Chaplin was probably the son of Charlie Chaplin sr. (1863-1901) and Hannah Harriet Chaplin (1865-1928) born. Both were artists at the British Music Halls, the father singer, and entertainer, the mother dancer, and singer. Shortly after Charles’ birth, his parents separated.
Charles and his four-year-old half-brother Sydney (1885-1965) grew up with the mother, who from 1896 could no longer pursue her profession due to psychological problems. Since Chaplin sr. Regularly deprived of maintenance payments, the family lived in great poverty and had to go to the poor houses, again and again, seek refuge in London.
Charlie Chaplin spoke as a child Cockney, a London dialect. Chaplin was given the first chance in 1894 to perform in front of an audience with a vocal performance. At the age of nine, on the recommendation of his father, he was hired for the music hall group The Eight Lancashire Lads.
Chaplin received board and lodging and basic schooling while touring the Lancashire Lads. When his father died of his alcohol addiction in 1901, Chaplin only had his mother and half-brother as family caregivers. He was half-orphaned, and therefore in almost all biographies one speaks of “Dickensian youth”.
And similar to the fate of children that Charles Dickens described in the 19th century, Charlie Chaplin found his way. Sydney now provided for the maintenance of brother and mother several times in asylums was admitted and declared 1905 to be insane.
Chaplin was almost entirely on his own, was first put into an orphanage with his half-brother when he was six, later roamed the streets and got to know the lowest social milieu that he was closely watching. He finally left school at the age of 13. He hired himself as an errand boy, newspaper seller, printer, toymaker, and glassblower to make a living.
After his engagement with the Lancashire Lads ended, Chaplin found engagements on the London stages. In the summer of 1903, he played his first major role in the unsuccessful play Jim, A Romance of Cockayne. he was followed by the role of the errand boy Billy in the stage version of Sherlock Holmes written by William Gillette.
This staging was a great success. Chaplin went on tour four times with this play until 1906. Sydney Chaplin also participated in the ensemble but left the theater company when he was with Fred Karnohas been contracted. Charles followed his brother and signed a two-year contract with Karno in 1908.
Personal life of Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin had an intense sentimental life, he marries four times, the first three with stars of his films, of which he divorced with scandal: Mildred Harris, Lita Gray, and Paulette Goddard. At the age of 54, he met Oona, the daughter of Irish playwright Eugene O’Neill, only 18, whom he married, had six children, and lived with her to the end of his life.
The Beginnings in Hollywood
With Fred Karno, who continued the tradition of comic pantomime with his theater troops, Chaplin quickly became one of the main actors. His first success at Karno was the role of drunkard Swell in the play Mumming Birds.
In 1910, Charlie Chaplin took the lead in the new production Jimmy the Fearless, which earned him positive reviews in the newspapers for the first time. The Yorkshire Evening Star described him as an “aspiring actor”, whose performance identified him as a born comedian.
Karno then offered Chaplin to tour North America with an ensemble. From June 1910 to June 1912, Karno troupe played in the United States and Canada. Chaplin’s escapade in a Night in an English Music Hall, a re-performance of Mumming Birds, was particularly popular with the public and the press.
After only five months in England, Karno sent his ensemble with Chaplin to America for a second tour. However, this tour was not as successful as the first, which is why Chaplin responded gratefully to the interest of the American film industry.
In May 1913, Adam Kessel and Charles O. Baumann
Chaplin was a salary of 150 dollars pledged in the week. Then he left the Karno troops on November 28, 1913.
Production United Artists
In 1919, Charlie Chaplin founded his own production company, United Artists, along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and DW Griffith. With his character “Carlitos”, he created films with a mixture of humor, poetry, tenderness, and social criticism, among them:
“The Kid” (1921) (O Garoto) that tells the story of a baby who ends up in the care of a vagabond, “The Gold Rush” (1925) (In Search of Gold) set in Alaska in the middle of the gold rush and “The Circus” (1928) (The Circus), which were the longest and most famous films of that period.
In 1927, with the arrival of spoken cinema, Charlie Chaplin opposed the new model of making cinema and continued to create masterpieces based on his mimics.
They are from that time: “City Lights” (1931) (City Lights) that tells the story of the tramp who pretends to be a millionaire to impress a blind florist, with whom he fell in love and “Modern Times” (1936) (Modern Times) who satirizes the mechanization of modernity.
Charlie Chaplin First Spoken Film
On October 15, 1940, the premiere of Chaplin’s first sound film was The Great Dictator (The Great Dictator). Chaplin’s satirical parody of fascism was also symbolically directed against US state power and militarism in general. The US censorship agency did not initially want to approve this anti-Hitler film.
The granddaughter Laura Chaplin gave the reason that the Germans had threatened economic sanctions. The American conservatives initially underestimated Hitler’s mania for power and saw him as a great politician, as an ally in Europe against Bolshevism Stalins.
So Chaplin’s film didn’t suit them at all. President Roosevelt himself wanted the film; for Chaplin, an acute threat to ban the strip would have been too risky. The film was particularly successful economically for Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin’s passionate speech towards the end of the film is famous, an urgent appeal to the soldiers and to the whole world for democracy, peace, and humanity.
Of the Nazis Chaplin was mistaken for a Jew. As an entry in his diary shows, Joseph Goebbels referred to him privately as early as 1928. At least since 1931 has been dubbed Chaplin from the Nazi press openly as a Jew.
Chaplin declined during the 1930s and 1940s in solidarity with the victims of Nazi persecution forward to refute this false information and set them correctly until much later. His friend Ivor Montagu said that this was the reason why Chaplin The Great Dictator produced; because he had previously drawn his attention to a Nazi script with the sentence: “This little Jewish standing man is as disgusting as it is boring”.
In the early 1940s, Charlie Chaplin discovered the young actress Joan Barry and wanted to make a film with her. They started a short affair with each other. After the relationship ended, Barry showed increasing mental health problems and harassed and threatened Chaplin.
After the birth of her child in 1943, she claimed that Chaplin was the father and sued him. A blood test spoke against his paternity, but Barry’s lawyer was able to convince the court that the tests were questionable. Chaplin lost the lawsuit and had to pay money to Barry and her child. The scandal significantly worsened Chaplin’s public image.
In 1942 the marriage to Paulette Goddard was divorced. Shortly thereafter, Chaplin and Oona O’Neill (1925-1991), daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill, met. On June 16, 1943, Charlie Chaplin and 18-year-old Oona O’Neill married. In 1944 the oldest of the eight children together, the daughter Geraldine, was born. The son Michael Chaplin followed in 1946.
Death
Chaplin’s health began to decline slowly in the late 1960s, after the film A Countess from Hong Kong was completed, and more quickly after receiving his Honorary Oscar in 1972. By 1977, he was having trouble speaking, and he started to use a wheelchair.
Chaplin died sleeping at the age of 88 as a result of a stroke, on Christmas Day 1977 in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland, a small private Anglican funeral was held two days later, as was his wishes, and was buried in the communal cemetery.
On March 1, 1978, his body was stolen from the grave, with a coffin and all, by two unemployed immigrants – the Polish Roman Wardas and the Bulgarian Gantcho Ganev – in an attempt to extort money from his widow Oona O’Neill.
Two months later, a major police operation captured the two criminals, the coffin was found buried in a field in Noville, a nearby village near Lake Geneva, and again buried in Corsier-sur-Vevey, but this time the family ordered a 6-foot (1.80 meters) thick concrete plug to protect the coffin of the filmmaker, to avoid new problems.
In the same cemetery, there is a statue of Chaplin in his honor. In 1991, his fourth and last wife, Oona O’Neill, passed away and was buried next to her husband in the village of Noville cemetery.
Charlie Chaplin Movies
- Carlitos Casanova, 1914
- The Tramp, 1915
- The Immigrant, 1917
- Dog Life, 1918
- Carlitos in the Trenches, 1918
- Country Idyll, 1919
- The Boy, 1921
- Pastor of Souls, 1923
- Luxury Wedding, 1923
- In Search of Gold, 1925
- The Circus, 1928
- City Lights, 1931
- Modern Times, 1936
- The Great Dictator, 1940
- Monsieur Verdoux, 1947
- Lights of the Ribalta, 1952
- A King in New York, 1957
- The Countess of Hong Kong, 1967