(posted 8014 days ago)Was he strange or just acting?
May 17 2002South London Press
CHARLIE Chaplin (1889-1977) was probably the most famous comic actor of all time, but has left us with the question of whether he was very strange or was this just part of the act.Born Charles Spencer Chaplin in Lambeth, the son of Charles and Hannah Chaplin, music hall performers, he first appeared with them on the stage at the age of five and at seven as one of a team of urchins billed as The Eight Lancashire Lads. Because his father died and his mother was in and out of mental institutions, he spent his life in a succession of children's homes, then the Lambeth Workhouse which became the hospital in Brook Drive, Kennington, behind the Imperial War Museum. At some time he had lived in a garret at 3 Pownall Terrace, Kennington Road, then 287 Kennington Road, where there is a plaque remembering him, and on Brixton Road, nearer the police station.
He made his reputation dressed as a tramp, with smudge moustache, frock coat, bowler hat, cane and outsized shoes in silent films from the mid-1910s, mixing buffoonery with pathos and eventually combining dialogue with music.
"A gentleman, a poet, a dreamer - always hopeful of romance" was how he described himself.
His film career started in the USA with Fred Karno and the Keystone Cops at less than £1 a week, a fact which the money conscious, publicity seeking actor never revealed.
But then his birth and upbringing in abysmal poverty made him extremely mercenary and assured him of amazing wealth. His film career spanned more than 70 years and included The Rink (1916), The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1926), The Great Dictator (1940) and Limelight (1962). Personal relationships for him were difficult. WC Fields, a lesser, more vulgar comedian, urged to sit through a Chaplin film, said of him: "The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer and if I have a good chance I will strangle him with my bare hands." Close women friends of Charlie were appalled to learn that he publicly and tastelessly described their physical attributes in detail. While he never attracted crowds in public like stars do in this celebrity age, he remained popular in the cinema.
Douglas Fairbanks, the famous actor, described him as "one unfortunate man struggling against the forces of nature". But writer-producer Billy Wilder said: "When Charlie wants to say something serious he is like a child writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony." Chaplin's political pronouncements caused outrage.
During the Second World War, he followed the Communist propaganda line calling for a second front in the East against Germany which led to later allegations that he was pro-Red.
In the 1962 witch-hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy and the American Legion - the much more powerful political US counterpart of the British Legion here - Chaplin fled to Switzerland announcing that he was "a citizen of the world".
And "I have no further use for America. I would not go back there even if Jesus Christ was the president".
But this also produced the revelation that he had always been British and had never become an American citizen.
Chaplin married four times, his third wife was actress Paulette Goddard, his fourth Oona, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neil, author of The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1932).
His first two divorces produced sensational newspaper headlines as did allegations of taking a minor across state boundaries for the purposes of sex, and a paternity suit in 1944. For his films he received two special Oscars, in 1928 and 1972, and was knighted in 1975.
Curiously, if you watch Chaplin on film today you will probably smile or even laugh as if it were just a normal child acting naturally in front of you.
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