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| The Reel and the Real |
Who would believe that Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin KBE (better known as Charlie Chaplin) spent a childhood living in and out of orphanages? His father Charles Spencer Sr. and his mother, Hannah Hill, were both stage performers; his father, a singer and mother, part of a touring drama company. He was born to them on 16th April, 1889. His mother did odd jobs as a nurse, as a dressmaker besides working on the stage to support herself and two sons, Charlie and his half-brother Sidney, born to her from an earlier marriage. His father did not contribute to the family upkeep at all, in fact Chaplin barely remembers even seeing him much. They had separated by the time he was two.
Charlie recalls how he
and his brother would entertain themselves sitting at the window and watching
passers-by; his mother would often mimic them, and it was from her that Charlie
learnt how to use his face and hands to emote.
His earliest memory of performing on stage was when his mother was booed
off stage and the manager, noticing the small kid watching her from the wings,
called him to replace her. All of five
years old, he managed to keep the crowd entertained and won a lot of applause.
But by the time he was
seven in 1898, his mother had to be admitted to a mental asylum and both the
brothers spent their childhood in orphanages across London. She would become
better from time to time and allowed to leave. She would encourage him to
perform, “She was the first one to make me believe that I had some sort of
talent,” he would confess later. But she
would often relapse and have to be readmitted, with Charlie having to take her
back to the asylum. He was 14 then. Recalling those days,
he would say, “I was hardly aware of a crisis because we lived in a continual
crisis; and being a boy, I dismissed our troubles with gracious forgetfulness.”
The Orphanage Days: The boy with his head tilted at the camera
Their father had become
a chronic alcoholic and passed away in 1900. Sydney joined the Navy in 1901, and
that left Charlie to fend for himself. Until he was 13, his mother had ensured
that he got some schooling. But after her
relapse, he had to give up all education. Though he lived alone and spent his
days scrounging for food, the young Charlie had grown interested in performing
and through his father’s contacts, became part of a dancing troupe. He worked
hard at the dance routine, doing many odd jobs on the side to keep body and
soul together, but longed to perform comedy on stage.
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| The Dancing Troupe: Fourth from left |
Meanwhile his brother Sydney returned in 1906, looking to make a career on stage like Charlie, and found work at Fred Karno, a reputed comedy company. He persuaded Karno to try out Charlie and in 1908, he got a lead role in Jimmy the Fearless that got good reviews in the press. The turning point came when Karno decided to tour America with the play and took Charlie along. America welcomed him calling him “one of the best mime artists seen here.” His acts resounded with hope and resourcefulness in the midst of abject poverty and sadness -- his best-loved part was where he impersonated a drunk. In 1913, while on his second tour of America he got an offer from Keystone Studios to work in films.
He joined but always dreamt of developing a
persona for a role that he was going to write for himself – a role that
everyone would identify him with. “I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat
tight, the hat small and the shoes large ...
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| The Tramp is Born |
The idea was rejected by his directors. He wanted to make the
comedy slower than Keystone’s standards. He was fully convinced though and
offered to pay the studio $1500 (about $40,000 in 2021 dollars) if the film didn’t
do well. Made with his convictions, Caught
in the Rain his directorial debut, was a success. The Tramp became his
signature, making him “universally familiar” a figure people identified with
wherever silent films went, “a part of the common language of every country.”
He jumped studios, began forming his own stock company of actors, some of whom with which he would work for the next thirty years. He found themes and settings that would identify with the tramp. The character became more gentle, more romantic, adding pathos and irony that people identified with. He became bold enough to add sad endings too. These were innovations that even serious critics of cinema sat up and took notice of. By the time he was 25 (1915), ‘Chaplinitis’ spread across America, stores began selling his merchandise, there were songs and cartoons featuring him – he had become film industry’s first international star and by the time he turned 26, the highest-paid one too.
Posing With his Tramp Doll
Sydney became his business manager. But
interestingly, with financial independence, he strived not for a luxurious
lifestyle, but for artistic freedom, to conceive of ideas that he could film at
his own pace. He built his own studio with the best production facilities that
money could buy in the day. The films that followed, The Kid, followed
by The Gold Rush were said to be epic comedies born out of grim
subjects, the first one where the tramp turned caretaker of a child, was based
on poverty and parent-child separation, steeped in his childhood experiences, with
the sets often reminiscent of the South London localities he roamed in search of
food and work as a child and the second one was about a prospector, looking for
gold but actually searching for love. They were top grossing films of the silent
era with the latter making $ 5 million at the box office (it had the famed
sequence of him dining off his shoes and the “Dance of the Rolls”) – both
together being screened in about 50 countries of the world. In 1925, Chaplin featured on the cover of the Times
magazine, the first movie star to do so, the same year, that the London asylum informed
him of his mother’s death.
Re-living his Childhood Traumas on Screen: The Kid
Dealing with Pangs of Hunger in The Gold Rush
How to Polish off your own Shoes as a Fine Delicacy: The Golden Era of Mime
He went on to make The Circus, with the tramp on a circus tightrope being plagued by monkeys, taken from the incidents of his own life; his first divorce, wherein he was accused of infidelity, abuse and perverted sexual desires that drove him practically to a nervous breakdown. The film did well enough to earn him a special prize at the very first Academy awards for “versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AaCIfIRRLY
Meanwhile sound technology came to the movies, but he refused to make it part of his films believing that the “talkies” took away from the artistry of the silent films. In defiance, he made City Lights without any dialogues. The film revolved around the tramp falling in love with a blind flower-seller and saving up money for an operation that would restore her sight. Although they kept dialogues out from the film, all his anti-sound views could not keep him from giving the film a glorious background score which he composed himself. City Lights went on to tug the audiences’ heartstrings worldwide (grossing over $ 3 million) and always remained his personal favourite.
Love is Blind: Romancing the sightless flower-girl in City Lights
For someone who lacked formal education, Chaplin had distinct
political and social ideology, which found unabashed expression in his films,
such as the Great Dictator in which he parodied Adolf Hitler’s
anti-Jewish obsessions and attacked fascism; Modern Times in which gave
vent to his fears of capitalism and machinery in the workplace; Monsieur
Verdoux, that criticised capitalism that encouraged wars and creation of
weapons of mass destruction. The Great Dictator went on to win five
Academy nominations, but Chaplin’s private life, his disastrous marriages to
Mildred Harris, Lita Grey and Joan Barry and alimony suits that kept the gossip
mills churning, his communist leanings that kept the FBI hot on his heels, all
proved to be his undoing. His life in Hollywood was decried as being “detrimental
to the moral fabric of America” and there was a public outcry for his
deportation. In this atmosphere, he made Limelight, a romance between a
once-famous stage performer and a young ballerina drawing inspiration from his
own life and his loss of popularity in Hollywood. He decided to premiere it in
London since it was based there, and the day after he left with his family, the
US revoked his work permit, saying he would have to re-apply for the same on his
return.
Playing Adolf Hitler in The Great Dictator
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| Playing out the Dilemma of Man vs. Machine in Modern Times |
This broke his heart and he decided to stay
back in Europe, which welcomed him and his film with open arms. In 1953, he
settled in Switzerland with his fourth wife Oona O’Neill (daughter of famous
American playwright, Eugene O’Neill) and all his eleven children (8 from his
marriage with Oona and 3 from his previous marriages). America continued to
remain hostile, leading his biographers to comment that his fall from the
public eye was perhaps “the most dramatic in the history of stardom in
America".
In the last twenty
years of his life, he made two films A King in New York and Countess
in Hong Kong. The first was his most openly autobiographical film ever, with
himself playing an exiled king who
seeks asylum in the United States, and his son, Michael, playing a boy whose parents
are targeted by the FBI. The second was made in Technicolor and the widescreen
format, with Marlon Brando as an American ambassador and Sophia Loren as a
stowaway in his cabin. Chaplin was cast in a minor role as a seasick steward.
The former was not allowed to release in America and received lukewarm success
in Europe, while the latter flopped everywhere. He published his memoirs, My
Autobiography, which became an international bestseller. He spent the remaining days of his life
reworking his older films such as The Kid and The Circus.
With Marlon Brando during the filming of Countess in Hong Kong
With Sophia Loren at his own Birthday Parties
With Fellow Legends from Hollywood: Movie stars Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and film director D W Griffiths
With Amy Johnson, Britain's greatest airwoman and Lady Astor, Britain's first lady parliamentarian (centre) and the legendary author George Bernard Shaw
With the world's greatest ballerina, Anna Pavlova
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| With Mahatma Gandhi, in London |
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| With Einstein: "They're cheering us both you because no one understands you and me because everyone understands me." |
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| How Could India Stay Uninspired by Chaplin's Greatness?: Raj Kapoor doing a desi Chaplin in Anari |
His health became progressively worse and he suffered a
series of strokes. Honours and awards still kept pouring in, the French Legion of Honour
in 1971 and in 1972, he was invited to the Oscars to receive an award for "the
incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this
century". It was widely interpreted as America trying to make
amends. He was sceptical about going back, but eventually when he did attend
the gala, he was accorded a 12-minute long standing ovation, the longest
recorded in the history of the awards. In 1975, he received knighthood from
Queen Elizabeth, though he was so frail that he had to accept it on a
wheelchair.
Accepting the Oscar from Jack Lemmon at the historic Awards presentation in 1972
KBE: Chaplin gets knighted by Queen Elizabeth II
Finally, on Dec 25th 1977, Chaplin passed away in his sleep of a stroke at age 88 and was buried on his estate in Switzerland. Sadly, controversy dogged him in death as in life, with his dead body being stolen for ransom. The Swiss police launched a massive manhunt and it was discovered in a field and restored to his rightful grave at his estate, this time in a steel vault.
leftrightthodasacenter.blogspot.com salutes
the comic genius on his 132nd
birthday on April 16, 2021. We look forward to reading your comments on this
legendary actor in the space below, and as always, do not forget to read, share,
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