From a childhood in London music halls to a figure recognised in every corner of the world, Charlie Chaplin turned a small tramp in baggy trousers into a symbol of hope.
Charlie Chaplin was born Charles Spencer Chaplin on 16 April 1889 in London. His parents were music-hall performers, and his childhood was marked by poverty and hardship. He began performing as a child, toured with music-hall companies and joined Fred Karno’s comedy troupe, with which he travelled to the United States. In 1913 he signed with the Keystone Film Company, and in 1914 he first appeared as the Tramp, in Kid Auto Races at Venice: a small man in a bowler hat, with a toothbrush moustache, a cane, oversized shoes and a walk that mixed dignity with clumsiness.
The Tramp became one of the most famous characters in cinema. Chaplin soon moved beyond short comedies to films in which laughter was balanced by sentiment. In The Kid (1921) the Tramp adopted an abandoned child, played by Jackie Coogan. In The Gold Rush (1925) he played a prospector in the Klondike, and in City Lights (1931) he played a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl. City Lights was made as a silent film even though talking pictures had arrived, because Chaplin believed that the Tramp spoke most clearly without words.
In 1919 Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith had founded United Artists, giving him control over his own work. Modern Times (1936) used the Tramp to comment on industrial life, assembly lines and unemployment during the Depression. In 1940, with The Great Dictator, Chaplin made his first film with full dialogue, playing both a Jewish barber and a dictator modelled on Adolf Hitler, and using comedy as a direct attack on tyranny.
Later films included Monsieur Verdoux (1947), in which he played a very different, darker character, and Limelight (1952), a story of an ageing music-hall comedian. In 1952, while travelling to London, Chaplin learned that his re-entry permit to the United States had been revoked during the McCarthy period, and he settled in Switzerland. His later films included A King in New York (1957) and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), his last film as director. In 1972 he returned to the United States to receive an Honorary Academy Award, and in 1975 he was knighted. He died on 25 December 1977 at Vevey in Switzerland. The Tramp, with his cane and his hopeful walk into the distance, remains one of cinema’s enduring images.