from Derek

While Harold Lloyd played the daredevil, hanging from clocks, and
Buster Keaton maneuvered through surreal and complex situations,
Chaplin concerned himself with improvisation." (Beaufait) Charlie
Chaplin meticulously improvised his way into the film industry through
the innovative originality of his physically humorous storytelling.
His life began on April 16, 1889 in Walworth, London. His father was a
music hall singer and his mother was a performer. His parents divorced
early on in Charlie's life, and his father resisted providing any
support, financial or otherwise, forcing the single mother to fend for
her two sons by herself. Hannah, Charlie's mother, was an actress and
a singer. She was a vital source of the birth and growth of Charlie's
artistic mind. "She was an integral part of Charlie's young life, and
he credited her with much of his success." (Tom Raymond) His influence
from the theatre practically started right when he was born. Charlie
Chaplin experienced a painful childhood, deriving from the hardship
that his mother had with providing for her family. The lack of money
was a gradual decline, as Charlie's mother lost her ability as an
actress and singer to signs of mental illness, she later resorted to
sewing in order to provide for Charlie, and Charlie's older
half-brother, Sydney. Charlie began showing innate acting abilities as
well as singing and dancing abilities at a very early age and as it is
told in the movie 'Chaplin' (which is highly suggested to watch),
starring Robert Downey Jr, he jumped on stage after his mother was
booed and thrown off stage during a musical number and won the
audience's hearts, culminating into a shower of coins and flowers
during the applause. He was merely 4 years old. Charlie unfortunately
began to lose his mother to mental illness and later to the
confinements of an asylum when he was 7 years old. The two brothers
were sent off to a government facility for orphaned and abandoned
children better known as a workhouse at the time. They were eventually
reunited within two months, but she was later readmitted for 8 months,
during which Charlie was exposed to his father's alcoholic lifestyle
along with his stepmother in a constrained environment.
At the age of 12, his father died. At the age of 14, his mother
was readmitted to the asylum, and while his half-brother Sydney was
out of town working on a sailing ship and on a stage, Charlie provided
for himself, fighting as hard he could not to return to the workhouse.
Charlie won a part in a show called, "Jim, a Romance of Cockney",
which revealed his natural gifts for performing to a live audience. He
sets foot with a touring theatre company in productions such as
'Sherlock Holmes', winning him praises everywhere he performed. When
Charlie was 16; his mother was institutionalized for 7 years.
His brother Sidney opened up opportunities for performing
through vaudeville theatre troupes such as the Karno troupe, which led
Chaplin to eventually leave the stage as well as Europe for the film
industry in the United States. He joined Mack Sennett's Keystone Films
Studio, marking a milestone both in his own life and in the history of
film. 1914 was the birth year of his first one-realer, "Making a
Living". That year, he made thirty-four more short films, including
"Caught in a Cabaret", "Caught in the Rain", "The Face on the Bar-Room
Floor", and "His Trysting Place". "These early silent shorts allowed
very
little time for anything but physical comedy, and Chaplin was a master
at it." (Beaufait)
Charlie Chaplin later learned to relent his childhood traumas
by his innate abilities to perform physical comedy as well as compose
and direct. "The true spirit of humor, I began to realize, does not
revolve about physical mishaps or even incongruities of dress and
behavior. These may be the outward paraphernalia of humor, like the
motley of the fool, but humor itself is woven deeper into the fabric
of life. I began to look upon humor as a kind of gentle and benevolent
custodian of the mind which prevents one from being overwhelmed and
driven to the point of insanity by the apparent seriousness of life."
He had an innate ability for slapstick humor. His mind revolved around
the evolving sun of physical acting. His style ranged in contrast
reflecting his dramatic life in comedic timing. He had a subtle
technique portrayed in the specificity and articulation of his actions
and the timing he flipped and flopped into often-unlikely realistic
routines. His mind stretched from the naïve talent that he was born
with into a mature and thoughtful reflection of the necessity to
reveal truth within society through humorous physical storytelling in
silent films. Later in his life, he commonly took vacations for the
purpose of writing new ideas for movies. His art resembled his life,
especially in times of trauma or emotional pain, but he meticulously
did so by the use of contrast between humor and pathos.
"Chaplin's slapstick acrobatics made him famous, but the
subtleties of his acting made him great." (Beaufait) His subtle
decisions on stage derived from his innate ability to improvise his
stories with merely the framework of a script. He would shoot and
print hundreds of takes, sometimes only using the material as artistic
experiments. His method was expensive, inefficient, and ultimately
unorthodox but it provided lively and spontaneous footage that could
not be duplicated
by any other artist. Taking what he learned from the footage, Chaplin
would often completely reorganize a scene. As Chaplin became more and
more adept at his craft, he would direct, and it wasn't uncommon for
him to decide halfway through a film to cut an actor and find someone
new for the job. The uncertain changes
and random shoots were pestering for many actors, but the complaints
were limited because they knew they were working for a master. Chaplin
had a very unique style of shooting during a scene when it came to
discovering the humor and pathos. He would create an environment and
work within it until something natural occurred. Chaplin once said, "I
am probably one of the very few actors on the screen who acts
primarily for his own entertainment. This in itself has been a great
asset, for it does not take a highly developed perception to note the
difference between a comedian who laboriously and painfully works his
way through mechanical gags and conventional formulae in order to get
a laugh and one who thoroughly enjoys what he is doing." His improve
is a unique example of the natural gift to tell a story. "The concern
of early theater and film was to simply keep the audience's attention
through overdramatic acting that exaggerated emotions, but Chaplin saw
in film an opportunity to control the environment enough to allow
subtlety to come through." (Beaufait) Chaplin's achievements during
the silent film era have affected many of today's films. Slapstick
comedy guaranteed the audience's constant attention during a
short-reel silent film, but with the advent of the feature-length
talkies, the need for more subtle acting became more apparent when
six-reel film was introduced. Chaplin was the first to demand this
depth in the film industry. Charlie once said about close ups, "The
language of the face cannot be suppressed or controlled. However
disciplined and practisedly hypocritical a face may be, in the
enlarging close-up we see even that it is concealing something, that
it is looking a lie... It is much easier to lie in words than with the
face and the film has proved it beyond doubt." "His rigor and concern
for the processes of acting and directing made his films great and led
the way to a new, more sophisticated, cinema." (Beaufait)
"And so this thing that I've got, whatever it is, whether it's
creativeness or whatever it is, I care. I really care." Charlie
Chaplin was not an educated businessman, but he managed to create many
business ventures for himself and others. For example, in an effort to
keep the major motion studios from monopolizing and controlling all
aspects of production, his closest friend, Douglas Fairbanks and his
screen legend wife, Mary Pickford, formed United Artists. As he
matured, his work became much more melancholy and he expanded his
creative ventures to mock problems in the world. During Hitler's reign
in Germany, rumors became known that Hitler copied Chaplin's mustache
in admiration, while representing two opposite sides of humanity.
There was this uncanny resemblance between Chaplin and Hitler. Chaplin
was once noted for saying, "The Tramp has become a storm trooper; only
the moustache is the same." Charlie was an underdog at heart, and he
was certainly a libertarian. When The Great Dictator came out, Charlie
put himself in a position to revolt against wealth and power. He had a
natural sixth sense about a lot of things.
He saw opportunities in his work to express political standpoints for
the good of humanity especially when director of the FBI, J. Edgar
Hoover expressed his opinion of the entertainment industry at the time
for being a major negative influence in society. This scene is
excellently portrayed in the film Chaplin. Hoover used sex secrets
that were gathered illegally by his special agents to manipulate
powerful people in America, containing 1,900 pages in Charlie's FBI
file. Charlie had a sixth sense about many things, including the
stock market. In 1927 and 1928, for example, he felt that the stock
market was going haywire, and he took everything he had and put it
Into Canadian Gold.
Charlie's golden performances created a golden pathway to wealth in
the nation by creating business opportunities. Chaplin's popularity
thrived so much that in the teen and twenties, theatre owners had to
display a simple cardboard image of the tramp with the statement, "I
am here to-day" in order to fill fans in their seats. His popularity
ignited marketing schemes that are still prominent today, such as
pins, hats, socks, ties, complete costumes, spoons, Christmas
decorations, statuettes, buttons, paper dolls, games, playing cards,
squirt rings, comics, dolls, and anything else on which his likeness
could be reproduced.
During a motion picture career that spanned 54 years, Charlie
made a total of 81 films. Only five were talkies and 67 were completed
before his 30th birthday. He was planning new ones to the very end.
Charlie Spencer Chaplin accepted his Special Academy Award on his 83rd
birthday. He received his knighthood from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth
II at Buckingham Palace in London becoming, Sir Charles Chaplin.
Charlie died, aged 88, on Christmas day 1977 at his home in Vevey,
Switzerland, surrounded by his wife Oona, and their children and
grandchildren. "But the humorist is just as much in search of truth
and beauty as the poet or philosopher. He is aiming at his own
interpretation of life, which he contends is just as sensible as the
grim and frowning mien with which it is customary to attack the
problems of living. And if it seems that there is a vast distance
between the truth and beauty and baggy trousers- I would remind the
reader that in this spirit of mockery which I have mentioned, in this
amusing contrast between our aims and our results, I include myself."