(April 16, 1889 – December 25, 1977)
Cheering for the Little Tramp
WHO’S THE funniest person you’ve
ever watched on screen? A comic actor and director who could raise belly laughs
without speaking a single word? I’d pick Charlie Chaplin. How about you?
The Little Tramp, the unforgettable
character he invented, was born purely by accident in 1915. While rushing to a
film shoot in California,
Chaplin grabbed clothes other people had left behind in the changing room. And
when he emerged, he found he had created a personality everybody loved. A
little guy in a bowler hat, a close-fitting jacket, a cane, outsize shoes ~ and
a brush-like moustache!
Before long, with the release of
‘The Kid,’ ‘Gold Rush,’ ‘City Lights’ and ‘Modern Times,’ Chaplin found himself
a star. That puzzled him, for he saw himself essentially as a shy British music
hall comedian on an American vaudeville tour. “I can’t understand all this
stuff. I’m just a nickel hall comedian trying to make people laugh. They act as
if I’m the king of England.”
The US
acknowledged him as its king of silent film comedy. Soon, so did crowds all
over the world.
But life wasn’t always a laugh for
Charles Spencer Chaplin, born at Walworth in England on April 16, 1889. Both his
parents were music hall artists, who separated when Charlie was very young. His
childhood was very sad, for his mother Hannah never earned enough to look after
Charlie and his older brother, Sydney. On occasion, Chaplin had to sleep on the
London streets
and forage for food in the garbage.
Charlie took his first bow on stage
when his mother made her last appearance. It happened when her voice broke
during a song. Her son stepped onstage and sang a popular song. That’s when a
star was born.
But soon Hannah was declared
insane. So, her boys had to spend time at the asylum, then at an orphanage.
Through all this years of success, Charlie never forgot his troubled childhood.
In 1933, while on a European tour, this is what he
yearned for: “I want to capture some of the hurt and joy again. To see the
orphan asylum where, as a child of five, I lived two long years. Those cold
bleak days in the playground! I want to see the drill hall where on rainy days
we were sheltered, sniveling around half-heated water pipes; the large
dining-room with its long tables; the smell of sawdust and butter as we entered
the kitchen.” Can you imagine a cold, loveless childhood like his, in the life
of a cine celebrity, whose friends included Albert Einstein and George Bernard
Shaw?
Chaplin did visit that bleak workhouse school at
Highgate. It made him recall a Christmas when he was denied two oranges and his
bag of sweets for breaking a rule. That would have broken his heart, if the
other children had not offered him a share of theirs. Spontaneously, the adult
Chaplin gifted the orphanage with a motion picture machine and insisted that
each child should have as many oranges and sweets as they pleased.
Chaplin’s memoirs recall an incident when he was
three. He swallowed a halfpenny while trying to copy one of Sydney’s magic tricks. He was held upside
down, shaken, slapped and probed under the glaring sitting room lights. Soon
afterwards, he discovered his mother’s ankle bone under her skirt. Suspecting
that she had swallowed a coin, the child enquired, “You must have swallowed a
big one, to have it stick out like that.” Isn’t that hilarious?
The star travelled to Venice
and Bali, Paris and Singapore. But the US did not
appreciate Chaplin’s politics. So he died at Corsier-sur-Vevey in Switzerland
on Dec. 25, 1977.
Isn’t it amazing that out of such troubled
beginnings emerged a man who still fills our lives with laughter? Through his
creation of human dignity in rags, a battler against the evil in our world.
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