Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977), known as Charlie Chaplin, was an English comic actor, film director and composer of the silent film era. Hebecame one of the best-known film stars in the world before the end of the First World War. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies,though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice Kid in 1914. Fromthe April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. WithMary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919. Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influencedby his predecessor, the French silent movie comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the MusicHall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin'sidentification with the left ultimately forced him to resettle in Europe during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Chaplin the 10th greatest male screen legend of alltime. In 2008, Martin Sieff, in a review of the book Chaplin A Life, wrote: "Chaplin was not just 'big', he was gigantic. In 1915, he burst onto a war-torn world bringing it the gift of comedy,laughter and relief while it was tearing itself apart through World War I. Over the next 25 years, through the Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler, he stayed on the job. It is doubtful any...