Charlie Chaplin

From Philosopedia

Chaplin, Charles Spencer [Sir] (16 April 1889 25 December 1977)

Sir Charlie Chaplin, who was knighted one year before his death, was the English film actor known internationally as the Little Tramp. With his baggy trousers, black derby, cane, and over-sized shoes, he entertained audiences in silent short movies, then silent features, and in 1940 movies with sound. With D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, he co-founded United Artists in 1919. His features include The Kid (1920), The Gold Rush (1924), City Lights (1931), The Great Dictator (1940), and Limelight (1952).

Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, was his fourth wife.

On political grounds, Chaplin was barred from returning to the United States, so he resided in Switzerland.

Born in London, Chaplin was the son of a music hall singer who left the boy’s mother before the child was two and saw him rarely thereafter, dying in 1901. His mother when he was but a child was certified insane in 1903. Chaplin and a brother survived the workhouse and several poor-law schools, then entered showbusiness. Ironically, by 1916, Chaplin was earning more money than the President of the United States. In My Autobiography (1964), Chaplin wrote,

• There is a fraternity of those who passionately want to know. I was one of them. But my motives were not so pure; I wanted to know, not for the love of knowledge but as a defence against the world’s contempt for the ignorant. So when I had time I browsed around the second-hand bookshops. In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll’s Essays and Lectures. This was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.

The pompous-sounding title of his autobiography reminded Wesleyan University professor Jeanine Basinger of Katharine Hepburn’s Me. She terms Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns as the best film book about Chaplin’s works and Lita Grey Chaplin’s My Life With Chaplin as the one written by an ex-wife with the longest list of complaints. Joyce Milton’s Tramp (1996) described Chaplin’s movies between 1931 and 1940 as handmade products in an era of mass production. She tells of his Dickensian childhood and his view of Communists: “They presented themselves as the representatives of the oppressed classes, with whom he identified, and they also purported to have the one correct answer to every question.” But he was not a party member and became disaffected with the group by the end of the 1920s. The Chaplin Milton portrayed is a petty individual, one who started lawsuits against his friends but one whose talent was in creating unique, hilarious movies. She depicted Chaplin as a great admirer of the Russian Revolution, quoting a 1942 remark of his that the American people were beginning

• to understand the Russian purges, and what a wonderful thing they were. Yes, in those purges the Communists did away with their Quislings and Lavals and if other nations had done the same there would not be the original Quislings and Lavals today.

Rarely, lamented Milton, had the Stalinists “received such a ringing endorsement.” For Chaplin's entire career, some level of controversy existed over claims of Jewish ancestry[[1]]. Nazi propaganda in the 1930s prominently portrayed Chaplin as Jewish, and FBI investigations of Chaplin in the late 1940s focused on such claims (for unknown reasons). Paranoia about alleged Jewish domination of the movie industry was probably the root cause underlying this controversy. There is no evidence of Jewish ancestry for Chaplin himself. Chaplin's half-brother Sydney was half Jewish, but he was never a practicing Jew. For his entire public life Chaplin fiercely refused to challenge or refute such claims, saying that to do so would always "play directly into the hands of anti-semites." He often said he would be proud of such ancestry, saying "all geniuses have some Jewish blood in them." His fearless portrayal of Jewish persecution in The Great Dictator bears this conviction out.

The Manual of a Perfect Atheist quotes Chaplin:

• By simple common sense I don’t believe in God, in none.

Chaplin died on Christmas Day, 1977, in Vevey, Switzerland, following a stroke, aged 88, and was interred in Corsier-Sur-Vevey Cemetery in Corsier-Sur-Vevey, Vaud. On March 1, 1978, his body was stolen in an attempt to extort money from his family. The plot failed, the robbers were captured, and the body was recovered 11 weeks later near Lake Geneva (and reburied under six feet of concrete to prevent another attempt).