Charles Chaplin

British actor-director

• Born: April 16, 1889
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 25, 1977
• Place of death: Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland

Through his screen persona of the Tramp, Chaplin represented the American “forgotten man” and presented the image of indomitable courage in the face of overwhelming social and political obstacles.

Early Life

Charles Chaplin was born in London, England, into a theatrical family. His father, Charles Chaplin, Sr., was an alcoholic music-hall performer who soon abandoned his family; his mother, née Hannah Hill, was an unsuccessful music-hall performer who suffered from mental illness most of her adult life. As a result of the unstable family life, Charles, Jr., and his older brother Sydney spent much of their youth in charity institutions, though Hannah, whom Chaplin revered, did what she could for her sons. In fact, Chaplin remained devoted to his mother, one of the most influential people in his life, until her death in 1928.

Chaplin’s career as a professional entertainer began in 1898, when he began touring with Eight Lancashire Lads, who worked in the English music halls. For the next seven or eight years Chaplin served a kind of apprenticeship in that he acquired in England those comedic talents that were to lead to his unprecedented success in the United States. From his music-hall sketches he learned about character development; from pantomime, also popular with English audiences, he learned clowning; from the circus he learned acrobatics. His success finally brought him to the attention of Fred Karno, who had several acting troupes in his employ. While working for Karno, Chaplin appeared in Jimmy the Fearless, an important act because “Jimmy” in many ways served as a forerunner of the later “Tramp.” During his employment with Karno, Chaplin also traveled to the United States, where he attracted the attention of Mack Sennett, who produced the famous Keystone comedies.

In 1913, Chaplin joined Keystone and began what was to become the most illustrious film career in history. The Tramp was not long in making his debut: He first appeared in Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), Chaplin’s third Keystone comedy. The costume, complete with ill-fitting clothes, small hat, cane, and mustache, had its roots as did the distinctly Chaplinesque walk in the English music-hall tradition. Despite his meteoric rise as an actor, Chaplin was not content until he directed his own films and achieved a measure of independence; while there is disagreement about which is his first directorial effort, he began directing his films in early 1914, probably with Twenty Minutes of Love. After making almost forty films in his two-year association with Sennett, Chaplin signed with Essanay and, after working briefly in their Chicago studios, moved to new studios in California.

The early California years prior to his full participation in United Artists , the company he formed with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith, were important ones in terms of Chaplin’s cinematic development. During the years (roughly 1915 to 1923) in which he worked with Essanay, Mutual, and Associated First National, Chaplin followed an impressive production schedule: In only eight years, he made some seventy films. Despite the quantity of films, the quality was also high, primarily because he was a workaholic who made severe demands on himself as well as on the stock company he created. Although he relied heavily on improvisation, his extensive use of rehearsals and his frequent retakes suggest that he was also a perfectionist.

While Chaplin’s screen image as the Tramp was beloved by Americans, it was also during this period that his public image became a bit tarnished. The political problems that followed him throughout his American career and which culminated in his eventual self-imposed exile began in World War I, when his failure to serve in Great Britain’s armed forces (he did make quite a war effort in the Allied cause) resulted in adverse publicity. His “image” problems were, unfortunately, compounded by his marital difficulties. Chaplin, who seemed almost obsessed with his young leading ladies, married Mildred Harris when she was sixteen years old, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later in 1920. (Ironically, the death of their son in 1919 seems tied to Chaplin’s The Kid, 1921, which starred Jackie Coogan and which is perhaps the best of his Associated First National films.)

Life’s Work

In many ways, A Woman of Paris (1922), Chaplin’s first film for United Artists, signaled a significant change in his filmmaking career: The actor-director also became a producer with control of all phases of production. He was truly an auteur filmmaker, the veritable “author” of his films, one of the few filmmakers who wrote, acted in, directed, and produced his films in fact, after the advent of sound, he wrote musical scores for some of his reissued silent films. In the post-Associated First National films, he also altered his filmmaking methods to give greater attention to shooting scripts while he made less use of on-set improvisation. In general, his emphasis seems to have shifted from quantity to quality, and he considerably slowed his production schedule.

After A Woman of Paris, a disappointment because he did not appear in his own film and because the film simply was not funny, Chaplin made the critically acclaimed and financially successful The Gold Rush (1925), the high point of his career. After The Circus (1928), his films became less comic and more political as they became “reflexive,” more related to his problems and concerns. While Modern Times (1936) attacks modern technology and its dehumanizing effect on people, it dramatizes Chaplin’s emerging economic philosophy. The Great Dictator (1940), in which Chaplin exploits his startling physical resemblance to Adolf Hitler, is also overtly political, but the excellence of the film is tainted, for many, by the lengthy final speech appealing for world peace.

The Great Dictator was the culmination of a blending of life and art in its espousal of unpopular pacifist sentiments associated with the political Left. It also indicated the extent to which Chaplin’s domestic and political problems replaced his artistic achievements in the eyes of the American public. Chaplin’s disastrous romantic affairs continued. After a widely publicized affair with actor Pola Negri, he had two more unsuccessful marriages: The first, to leading lady Lita Grey, lasted from 1924 to 1926; the second, to actor Paulette Goddard, lasted from 1936 to 1942. In addition, his tax problems with the Internal Revenue Service, which were to plague him throughout his American career, first surfaced in 1927. It was Chaplin’s political activity, however, notably his continuing flirtation with “socialist” causes and the Soviet Union, that brought him to the unwelcome attention of the U.S. government, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Its interest in Chaplin, which began as early as 1922, eventually resulted in his coming under scrutiny by the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era.

The 1940’s and early 1950’s were particularly turbulent years for Chaplin, who made only two films, Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), before he left the United States in 1952. Both films are far removed from the comic image of The Tramp (1915), which is the Chaplin trademark. Verdoux, for example, is a capitalistic “Bluebeard” who defends himself against murder charges by claiming that murder is only a logical extension of business; Calvaro, the protagonist of Limelight, who has a career that parallels Chaplin’s, maintains that the artist must be selfish because art is happiness. Calvaro’s insistence on selfishness seems to be Chaplin’s defense of his own ego-centered life. Chaplin’s lack of productivity was partly the result of becoming out of step with an America that revered the simple virtues of the Tramp while it preferred to ignore the political issues of the day.

Not only did Chaplin become less popular, but he also became embroiled in political and domestic issues that consumed much of his time and energy. His unpopular leftist political views, regarded as communistic by many, were attacked by conservative and reactionary groups, who urged his deportation. Chaplin himself did little to appease his detractors; indeed, his comments only seemed to incense the opposition. Adding to his political problems, which led to the U.S. government rescinding his reentry pass when he left the United States in 1952, was a sordid paternity suit initiated by Joan Barry and an indictment against him for violating the Mann Act. Although blood tests proved that he was not the father of Barry’s child, he lost the paternity suit. While he was found innocent of Mann Act charges, the notoriety associated with both cases doubtless contributed to the government’s continued harassment of Chaplin.

Chaplin and Oona O’Neill, his fourth wife (although she was in the mold of his other young wives, their marriage lasted), moved to England and then to Switzerland, but his last two films were neither commercially nor critically successful. A King in New York (1957) was quite autobiographical, dealing with an exiled king who arrives in New York full of optimistic hopes for peace. In the film, Chaplin bitterly attacked the Cold War witch-hunt mentality that had been responsible for his own fate. During his last years he turned inward: He published My Autobiography in 1964, and he spent much time reissuing his old films and writing musical scores for his old silent films. Ironically, the public that deserted him when he abandoned comedy for political philosophy returned to offer him the recognition he so richly deserved. In the 1970’s he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and received several film awards, including an honorary Academy Award and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Vindicated and fittingly honored, he died in his sleep on December 25, 1977.

Significance

Though he never became an American citizen, Chaplin captured the American spirit as few other performers have. In his Tramp persona he dramatized humanity’s tragicomic struggle with fate as he portrayed the forgotten American, the underdog who overcame outsize adversaries, upper-class exploiters, and stubborn “machines” with an irreverence that was more American than British. The most popular performer of his time, he earned $670,000 when he was but twenty-five years old.

That success, however, was not achieved without an incredible dedication to his craft, an ego that brooked no opposition, and a consuming desire to create his own film kingdom over which he would have complete control. Though he was at home before live audiences he had appeared as a child in English music halls film was his medium because it allowed for “perfect” performances and did not depend on interaction between performer and audience. Film mistakes do not live; they are cut and are replaced by successful retakes. So great was his authority that he was “the great dictator” on the set, where he forced actors to duplicate his performances in their parts. Perhaps his desire to exercise total control explained his preference for young performers who might be more malleable than older, more established actresses. Indeed, control seemed to be an obsession for Chaplin, who was a dictator at home as well as on the set and who for years dreamed of making a film about Napoleon a film that never became a reality.

As long as his Tramp persona represented the American underdog who could aspire to make the American dream come true (one of his most beloved films was The Immigrant, 1917), Chaplin caught the American spirit and rode the crest of popularity. He failed, however, to adapt to change he resisted the coming of sound films and to recognize a shift in American thought and values. When the Tramp discarded his costume and assumed the robes of preacher, his was a message at odds with a conservative America that expected laughs, not philosophy, from its comic genius. When he left the United States, his alienation from American values and culture became even more pronounced, and his last two films seem at their best old fashioned and at their worst simply irrelevant. Today it is Chaplin’s silent films featuring the Tramp that endure, and it is the image of the Tramp that advertisers exploit. Chaplin was the Tramp, and his public was unwilling to accept him in any other role.

Bibliography

Chaplin, Charlie. Charlie Chaplin: Interviews. Edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. A collection of Chaplin interviews conducted between 1915 and 1967 that focus on his film aesthetic.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. My Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. Chaplin’s account of his life is quite accurate, considering that the work was written primarily from memory. The focus, naturally, is on Chaplin, and many of his close associates were omitted from the book.

Jacobs, Lewis. The Rise of the American Film. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939. Chapter 13 is devoted to Chaplin as individualist. Jacobs lauds Chaplin as a “contemporary Don Quixote” whose social awareness was not outdated in 1939.

Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Kerr devotes three chapters to Chaplin’s development in the silent film. The book is valuable for putting Chaplin in context with other great silent comedians.

Lyons, Timothy J. Charles Chaplin: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. The standard, indispensable, bibliographical guide for Chaplin students. Includes an annotated bibliography and a filmography.

McCaffrey, Donald W. Great Comedians: Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton, Langdon. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968. A serious comparative study of the great silent comedians, this book also discusses each comedian’s ability to adjust to the advent of the sound film.

Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. The only authorized biography of Chaplin, Robinson’s book is exhaustive in its treatment of the London influence, the political problems, and Chaplin’s work habits. Contains invaluable appendixes.

Schickel, Richard, ed. The Essential Chaplin: Perspectives on the Life and Art of the Great Comedian. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 2006. A collection of thirty-three essays written by Chaplin’s contemporaries that explore the cultural impact of his films.