The most recognized human being on earth for most of the twentieth century — creator of the Little Tramp, inventor of cinema's emotional grammar, and the first artist to make the whole world laugh and weep simultaneously.
Portrait · Charlie Chaplin
Born Charles Spencer Chaplin on April 16, 1889, in Walworth, London, to music hall performers — his father an alcoholic who died young, his mother a singer whose mental breakdown landed her in a workhouse. Chaplin and his brother Sydney spent time in a workhouse themselves, an experience that never left him and that fed everything he created.
He came to America with Fred Karno's vaudeville troupe in 1913 and was signed by Keystone Studios almost immediately. Within a year he had created The Tramp — the mustachioed, cane-twirling, over-sized-booted figure who became the first global celebrity of the modern era, recognized in parts of the world that had no running water but somehow had a cinema.
What set Chaplin apart from his contemporaries was that he controlled everything: he wrote, directed, produced, composed the music, and starred. His films were not products of a system — they were works of one highly disciplined imagination. City Lights (1931), which he made as a silent film at the height of the sound era, is widely considered one of cinema's two or three greatest achievements; the final scene between the Tramp and the blind flower girl remains, a century later, unbearably moving.
In 1952, under McCarthyite pressure and facing revocation of his re-entry permit, Chaplin left the United States and settled in Vevey, Switzerland, never returning. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1972 and was knighted in 1975, two years before his death on Christmas Day, 1977.
Released four years into the sound era, entirely silent, it was widely predicted to fail. It did not. The final scene — the Tramp seen for the first time by the girl whose sight he has restored — achieves an emotional register that film has rarely matched before or since. It is widely considered the greatest film ever made.
Paulette Goddard's Gamine and Chaplin's Tramp together make the film's closing image — two small figures walking down a long road — one of cinema's defining images of hope against all evidence. His farewell to the character that made him immortal.
The closing speech — in which the Jewish Barber, mistaken for the Dictator, addresses the world — was and remains one of cinema's most extraordinary moments. Chaplin wrote it before knowing the full extent of the Holocaust. He later said he could not have made it had he known.
The scene in which the authorities take the boy from the Tramp — and the Tramp's frantic pursuit across rooftops to get him back — broke audiences in 1921 and still does. Chaplin invented something here that cinema has been borrowing ever since.
Pure invention in every frame — Chaplin reportedly chose the Klondike setting after seeing photographs of prospectors crossing Chilkoot Pass. The bread-roll dance remains one of the most elegant comic images in the history of cinema.
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.
Charlie Chaplin is not one of the great artists of cinema — he is the artist without whom cinema, as we understand it, would not exist. The emotional vocabulary he developed for the screen in the first three decades of the medium remains the foundation of everything that came after. His influence is so pervasive that it has become invisible.
The historical ironies are considerable: the man the US Senate considered a Communist was himself a product of the most destitute poverty the English-speaking world could produce. His art was political because his life had been. The Tramp who keeps walking at the end of every film is not an optimist by temperament but by necessity — there is no other choice, and Chaplin knew it.