English actor and silent film director, who gained international fame by playing Charlo, and spread and spreads plenty of laughter to young and old alike.
Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889 in London to theatrical parents. His childhood was anything but laughing and happy. After the early separation of his parents, he spent his infancy among a bunch of theatregoers, accompanying his mother on her tours of the English countryside. But when he found himself fatherless and motherless, little Charlie's life began to look more and more like something out of the pages of Dickens. To earn the family's livelihood, he improvised little dances on the streets of seedy London and collected the pennies of passers-by.
His parents' old acquaintances, however, helped him get a proper job with the children's dance troupe the Eight Lancashire Lads. By the age of eight he was already a professional actor, performing children's roles in shows in London, and at 17 he joined Fred Carno's then successful company, with whom he made two tours of America.
Arriving in Los Angeles in December 1913, he was already determined not to return to England. His first film, Making a Living (1914), did not excite the producers of the then nascent Hollywood, but they did discern in the English comedian with the funny walk a special talent. Chaplin wanted to conquer the new mass entertainment genre, bringing to the big screen all the experience of the travelling theatre.
A few months later and with 11 films under his belt, he already felt like a "veteran" actor, ready to take the camera in his own hands. It is the era of experimentation, through which the so familiar and universally recognizable image of Charlot will be born: the good-natured tramp with the short black moustache, the oversized shoes, the half-brimmed hat in a smaller than normal size and the bamboo cane, trying to survive by maintaining his dignity in a world of social injustice and inequality.
In 1921, "The Kid" ("The Kid") was released in theaters and is remembered as his first masterpiece. Meanwhile, his impoverished youth is a distant memory. With his new contract at Mutual, Chaplin becomes the highest-paid man in Hollywood, with a salary that doesn't drop below $10,000 a week and an additional $150,000 bonus. He is in the most creative period of his career, emerging as an unsurpassed master of pantomime, able to move his audience from laughter to tears with a simple expression or gesture and with a grace often likened to that of a ballet dancer.
In 1919 he founded United Artists with two other great actors of his time, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and continued his box-office successes, ignoring for several years the new technology of talking cinema, fearing that the essence of his art, mime, would disappear between the dialogue. His works such as 'City Lights' (1931) and 'Modern Times' (1936) were silent films that were hugely successful in the era of talking cinema. In 1940 he made his first talking film, "The Great Dictator", which was a satire of Adolf Hitler.
Viewers around the world may have loved Chaplin, but his critics in America were not few. The reasons were sometimes his political views (he was accused of being a communist by Hollywood's McCarthyist lobby and bitterly exiled himself to Switzerland in 1952) and sometimes his personal life.He made four marriages, two of which were to underage brides: at 28 he married 16-year-old actress Mildred Harris, at 35 the beauty Lolita MacMurray (later Lita Gray) and at 44 the 19-year-old actress Paulette Godard. His fourth and last wife was Una O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill. When they married he was 54 years old and she was 18. Despite her father's objections, their marriage lasted until Chaplin's death and the couple even had eight children.
Chaplin never received a proper Academy Award. He was honored in 1927 by the American Film Academy, which awards the Oscars, for his "genius, writing, directing and producing" of The Circus, and in 1972 for his "immeasurable contribution to the development of cinema as the greatest art form of the 20th century." In 1975 he was knighted in the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth and made a "Sir".
Charlie Chaplin died at Christmas 1977 in Vevey, Switzerland, at the age of 88.
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