Charlie Chaplin

Born: April 16 1889
Where: London, England, UK
Died: December 25 1977 in France

Recognized as one of the greatest actors in movie history, Chaplin drew from his impoverished childhood in South London to create the legendary little Tramp.

The undaunted cavalier from the 19th Century trying to survive the materialistic, isolating, technologically-driven 20th Century became the industry's first superstar.

Chaplin controlled every aspect of the filmmaking process (producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies in which he starred.

Both parents were music hall entertainers and his father, who eventually died from alcoholism in 1901, abandoned the family for another woman when Charlie was three years old.

His mother's continued performing led to his own debut at the age of five, but it wasn't long before mental illness forced her from the stage into an asylum.

Chaplin and his older half-brother Sydney were condemned to a childhood spent between public charity homes and fending for themselves on the streets.

Chaplin began his career in earnest in the summer of 1898 as one of the Eight Lancashire Lads, a children's musical troupe touring England's provincial music halls.

By the age of 16 he was playing the featured role of Billy in William Gillette's West End production of Sherlock Holmes in 1905.

At the prompting of his brother, Chaplin then secured a spot in Fred Karno's music hall revue, quickly becoming its star attraction.

He remained with the Karno troupe for seven years until film producer Mack Sennett discovered him during his second tour of America in 1913 and signed him to the Keystone Company.

Chaplin's first film for Sennett, Making a Living, was mediocre, featuring him in standard English music hall garb racing across the frame for the entire reel.

Kid Auto Races at Venice, however, was a different story after he borrowed what was to become his trademark bowler hat, reedy cane and baggy pants (from Fatty Arbuckle) to go with floppy shoes.

After a four-month apprenticeship, Chaplin, now directing and scripting his shorts, began separating himself from the Sennett style.

By the end of his Keystone year, Chaplin had become so popular that Sennett's offer of $750 per week (five times his 1914 salary) was not enough to keep him in the fold.

Joining the Essanay Company for $1250 per week plus a $10,000 signing bonus, he embarked on a transitional year between the knockabout Sennett farces and the more subtle comedies.

The Tramp in 1915 looked to the future, firmly establishing the relationship of his screen persona to the respectable social world.

Ranking among his greatest achievements, Chaplin's twelve Mutual two-reelers of 1916 and 1917 were so inventive, intimate and hilariously clever that they brought him worldwide popularity.

In One A.M., he once again tailored his Karno drunk for the camera. Behind the Screen glimpsed life inside a movie studio and The Rink put him on roller skates for the first time.

Easy Street cast him in his only performance as a policeman while converting the most sordid subjects (i.e., wife-beating, drug addiction, police brutality and rape) into surprisingly funny material for comic routines.

He brought drunken chaos to an entire health spa for The Cure before ending his Mutual run with two remarkable films, The Immigrant, which identified the plight of a whole class with the solitary tramp and The Adventurer.

As an independent filmmaker distributing through First National, Chaplin broke out of his popular two-reel format.

Though his contract called for 12 two-reelers in one year, he actually took five years to deliver eight films, of which only three were of the specified length.

During this run Chaplin faced his first disappointment when Sunnyside was his first movie not to find favour with the public.

More than 18 months elapsed before the appearance of The Kid, his most ambitious film yet, which to the consternation of First National had grown from its planned three-reel length into a six-reeler.

Chaplin worked hard with his child co-star Jackie Coogan, shaping the boy into a mirror of himself and the result was the biggest hit in motion picture history to that time, excluding D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation in 1915.

In 1919, Chaplin along with fellow stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and director Griffith founded United Artists, for whom his first film was the atypical (Trampless) A Woman of Paris.

Though quite sophisticated for its time, it flopped commercially but became a powerful influence on Ernst Lubitsch, the eventual grand master of the genre.

His next four features returned to the Tramp and his conflict with "normal" social expectations, forming what might be called the "marriage group."

The Gold Rush featuring the famous feasting on shoe leather scene and he was back on the road in The Circus after failing to fulfill the heroine's vision of romance.

Audiences rewarded the director's bold move of resisting sound for City Lights, proving they would still see a silent film if Charlie Chaplin was the star.

He bid farewell to the Tramp in Modern Times, allowing him his only talking sequence on film, a jumble of gibberish in the form of a song.

His output would slow further with his final three American films coming in the next 16 years.

The Great Dictator, his first full-talkie, combined slapstick, satire and social commentary, casting Chaplin in the dual role of a Tramp-like Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, the Hitler-like dictator of Tomania.

The Tramp had been a character of 19th Century sensibilities, a leftover from a Dickensian world, but with Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin proved he was firmly in the 20th Century with a resonant film of his times.

Under fire for his liberal views in an era defined by Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist tirades, Chaplin released a final affectionate tribute to his art and its traditions, Limelight.

Having never become an American citizen, he found his re-entry permit to the USA revoked after he had attended its London premiere and settled with his family in Switzerland.

Public reaction against Chaplin was so rabid that his first European film (A King in New York), a slight satire on American consumerism and political paranoia, remained unreleased in the United States until 1973.

Chaplin's final film, A Countess From Hong Kong, in which he merely made a cameo appearance as a waiter, was even more disappointing, suffering as had its predecessor at the hands of a low budget, tight schedule and a production team of strangers.

Twenty years later Hollywood welcomed the Tramp back, presenting Chaplin with an Honorary Academy Award amid the loudest and longest ovation in its history.

The frail man of 82, who had long since given up radical politics, also picked up an Oscar the following year for writing the score of Limelight.

His final great tribute came when Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1975.