Charlie ChaplinEssay Preview: Charlie ChaplinReport this essayCharlie Chaplin was many things to many people. He was first and foremost a great silent artist. He was a complex individual who delighted and enraged. He moved human beings emotionally one-way or the other. He lived at the top of the world, and his screen image (instantly recognizable in silhouette) pierced the psyches of people everywhere.
Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889 in Walworth. London. He spent his childhood in extreme poverty. Although both his parents were music hall artists, they separated when he was very young. But it was his mother who inspired him to pursue a career in music and acting. Though he pursued learning passionately in later years, young Charlie left school at 10 to work as a mime and roustabout on the British vaudeville circuit.
Chaplin started off his career when he joined the Eight Lancashire Lads, which eventually lead him to parts in Sherlock Holmes and Caseys Court Circus. Later, his brother, Sydney, managed to get Charlie involved with the Fred Karno Company, which was basically a comedians college. In the early 1910s, Charlie toured the United States with the Karno group. While on his tours, Charlie became associated with the Keystone Film Company, in which Charlie took his first glimpse into the emerging movie industry.
In his early movie career, Chaplin starred in Making A Living and other movies made by Keystone Film Company. And finally Chaplin experienced directing a movie when he directed Twenty Minutes of Love. As Chaplins success increased, he moved on to other film companies with better deals. Along with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith, Chaplin formed United Artists in 1919. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights (1931).
In 1925, Chaplin turned down the offer to be a film director to return to his home country in the United States. Chaplin was living in Washington State, waiting to rejoin The Jazz Singer—which he’d later make his fortune for as a director and film-maker. At the time, Chaplin wasn’t interested in any political or political activities; he had already moved to Berlin. However he had begun writing a new novel, It Follows, that would be released in 1941. Chaplin was a little apprehensive of writing a novel, so he decided to write The Jazz Singer. However even before the story was to be published, Chaplin’s love of the novel was starting to develop, and he wanted a novel to put his love of politics and business ahead of his love of musical instruments. Although he was very busy with his books and his movies, The Jazz Singer was still a work in progress. While he kept a journal of his new work, he also wrote his new film debut. It Is a Wonderful Life (1930), which he wrote in 1936. The Jazz Singer, like it or not, was quite popular among German fans, but it was considered an extremely serious work, and Chaplin felt strongly about the film. For many filmmakers, the work was considered inappropriate because it left little room for personal feelings. For Chaplin, he loved the way his work portrayed the ideal of man being happy, and so even as he watched The Jazz Singer, he felt a profound sense of alienation, as if he had lost sight of some other source of entertainment. Although many critics disliked this version of Chaplin’s work, much of the humor was actually his own. He was more interested in his own work of political satire than his own performance. Although he sometimes had good words to say about his performances, his best work was often directed with an out-of-character accent. With a high-handed demeanor, Chaplin even used a small child’s voice to express frustration, anger and pain. For him, his work was an artistic expression and much of the humor was humor. There were many great scenes of Chaplin with the audience. At the end of his time in Berlin, Chaplin would be seen in the auditorium of the opera company, a big man dressed in his famous clothes sitting on a chair in bed with his head bent over the floor. Chaplin was the first man at that theater to perform at this age, and his performance as a child has always stood as an unforgettable memory. His father, Alfred Hitchcock, even wrote about his grandfather that he loved that he was “the child of a real life, young man, at the time of his fame.” Although the father-in-law did not have a lot of influence on how Chaplin composed his work, he did make some
In 1962 Charlie received an honorary degree from Oxford University. And in 1972, twenty years after he left the US, Chaplin was invited back to receive a special Academy Award for achievement. This was followed by a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II. His star was again on the rise!
Some may choose to remember Chaplin as a man of poor morals and questionable social views. But we who love him remember him simply