Charles Chaplin

Abstract

Charles Chaplin (b. 1889–d. 1977), better known as Charlie Chaplin, was one of the greatest film stars of the 20th century and one of the most important filmmakers in the history of the medium. Born into poverty in London to a family of music hall performers, Chaplin grew up in destitution with his mother, who suffered from periods of insanity. He joined the prestigious Karno stage company while a teenager and from there was recruited to the fledgling Keystone Studios, famous for its raucous brand of slapstick films. Chaplin excelled at Keystone, quickly developing the “Tramp” character that would become his mainstay and graduating to directing his own short films after only weeks on the job. He left Keystone within a year for a series of more lucrative contracts, quickly becoming one of the highest-paid figures in the film industry and creating a classic body of short films. By 1919 Chaplin had amassed a large enough fortune to start his own film studio and co-founded United Artists to distribute his works, leaving him all but free from outside influence or interference. Throughout the 1920s he created the feature films that would help define his legacy but struggled with the advent of sound technology, refusing to include spoken dialogue in his films for nearly a decade. Chaplin’s first full talkie, The Great Dictator (1940), offered a scathing parody of fascist dictatorship and marked a newfound political mode in his filmmaking. Chaplin’s leftist politics, coupled with a scandalous and protracted paternity suit in the mid-1940s, soon led to a marked decline in his popularity, such that when he left for a worldwide publicity tour for Limelight (1952) he was denied reentry to the country. Chaplin lived the remainder of his life in Switzerland, returning to America only in 1972 to accept an honorary Academy Award. Critical appraisal of Chaplin’s body of work has varied over the decades. Hailed as a genius from early in his career, he saw his critical fortunes fall with his transition to talking pictures. Yet Chaplin always had a coterie of dedicated critical supporters, including such illustrious figures as André Bazin and Andrew Sarris, and the critical estimation of his work has only grown since his death. He remains today one of the most lauded and beloved figures in film history.