Charlie Chaplin and the Heartbreaking Reality Behind the Greatest Comedy in History

Early Life and Childhood

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889 in London, England. Both his parents were music hall performers, singers and entertainers who worked the stages of Victorian London. On paper that sounds like a creative and interesting household to grow up in. In reality it was anything but.

His father Charles Senior was a talented singer who drank heavily and walked out on the family when Charlie was barely one year old. His mother Hannah was warm and loving and genuinely talented but she suffered from serious mental illness her entire life. She would be fine for stretches and then not fine at all and when she was not fine there was nobody left to look after the boys.

Charlie and his older half brother Sydney spent their childhood going in and out of workhouses. The first time Charlie was sent to one he was seven years old. Workhouses were not charitable institutions in any warm sense of the word. They were effectively prisons for people who had nothing. The children slept in large dormitories, ate whatever was put in front of them and were beaten for misbehaving. Charlie described his time there as a forlorn existence and that is about as gentle a way of putting it as you can manage.

His father died when Charlie was twelve. Then in 1898 his mother had a complete breakdown and was committed to a mental asylum. Charlie was nine years old and his brother Sydney was a teenager and suddenly there was nobody. No parents, no home, no money. Just two boys in London trying to figure out what came next.

The Stage Was the Only Way Out

Both Charlie and Sydney had inherited something from their parents that the workhouse could not take away. They could perform. Charlie had actually first stepped onto a stage at five years old when his mother lost her voice mid performance and he walked out and finished the show for her. The audience threw coins onto the stage and Charlie stopped to collect every one of them before singing another song. Even at five he understood something about the transaction between a performer and an audience.

By the time he was nine he was earning money doing clog dancing with a group called The Eight Lancashire Lads. By fourteen he had a proper acting role playing a newspaper boy in a production of Sherlock Holmes that ran for years. He was not going to school. He was barely able to read and write. But he could make people watch him and that turned out to be worth more than any classroom qualification.

At nineteen he joined the Fred Karno comedy company, one of the most respected comedy troupes in England. He became their star performer and in 1910 the company toured America. That trip changed everything.

Hollywood

In 1913 a filmmaker named Mack Sennett saw Charlie perform with the Karno troupe and signed him to appear in his Keystone comedy films. Charlie moved to America and started making silent short films at a pace that seems impossible looking back at it now. Multiple films a month. He was not just acting in them either. He was writing, directing and pushing to control every detail of what appeared on screen.

It was in 1914 that he first appeared as the character that would make him the most recognizable face on earth. The Tramp. A little man in a bowler hat, a tight jacket, baggy trousers and oversized shoes, walking through the world with a dignity that the world kept failing to recognize. Charlie has said the character came together almost by accident one afternoon when he was putting together a costume from random pieces of clothing lying around the studio. But anyone who knows where he came from can see that The Tramp was not an accident. That character was everything he had lived through in those London workhouses, dressed up in comedy and sent out into the world.

By 1915 he was the most famous person in the film industry. By 1916 he was earning ten thousand dollars a week, a number so large that most people hearing it could not process what it meant. The kid who had been sent to a workhouse at seven was now one of the highest paid entertainers alive.

In 1919 he co-founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith so that artists could own and control their own films rather than being at the mercy of studio bosses. That was not a small thing in 1919.

The Films That Mattered

Charlie Chaplin made comedies but they were never just comedies. The Kid in 1921 was about a man raising an abandoned child, based almost entirely on his own memories of poverty and abandonment in London. The Gold Rush in 1925 showed the Tramp so hungry he was eating his own boot. Modern Times in 1936 was about factory workers being crushed by industrial machines and economic inequality. The Great Dictator in 1940 had him playing a parody of Adolf Hitler at a time when that was a genuinely dangerous thing to do. The famous final speech in that film, where Chaplin steps out of character and speaks directly to the audience about humanity and hope, is still one of the most watched clips in cinema history.

He made all of these without ever properly learning to read and write. He composed the music for his own films, including the song Smile which was later covered by Nat King Cole. He directed, wrote and produced almost everything himself. He was not working from a finished script most of the time either. He would build the set, start filming and figure out the jokes once he was standing in the middle of it.

Being Pushed Out of America

Charlie Chaplin lived in America for decades but never became an American citizen. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been building a file on him for years, convinced he was a communist because of the political themes in his films and his outspoken views on poverty and inequality. Senator McCarthy’s era made things dangerous for anyone with left leaning politics and Chaplin was a visible target.

In 1952 he sailed to Europe for the premiere of his film Limelight. While he was at sea the American government revoked his re-entry permit. He was not allowed back. He settled in Switzerland with his wife Oona and their eight children and never returned to America until 1972 when he came back to accept an honorary Academy Award. The audience gave him a twelve minute standing ovation. It was one of the longest in Oscar history.

What His Story Comes Down To

Charlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse at seven years old. His father was gone and his mother was losing her mind and there was no system designed to catch him when he fell. What he had was a ability to make people laugh and a hunger to get as far from that workhouse as his legs could carry him.

He became the most famous person on earth during his lifetime. Not famous in one country or one industry. Globally famous in a way that very few people in history have ever been. And every character he ever played, every little man being kicked around by a world that did not notice him, was drawn from somewhere real.

He once said that life is a tragedy when seen in close up but a comedy in long shot. Coming from someone who had lived what he lived, that is not a joke. That is just the truth.