Interesting and unexpected facts from the life of the legendary actor
This Tuesday, April 16, marks the 135th anniversary of the birth of world cinema legend Charlie Chaplin.. The British comedian created a unique lyrical image of the “little man” on the screen and fell in love with millions of people around the world.
And although Chaplin is now perceived exclusively as a great actor and film classic, the comedian’s life was far from being as carefree and cheerful as in his films. Telegraph collected interesting and unexpected facts from the biography of the brilliant actor.
On stage – from the age of five
Charles Spencer Chaplin made his debut on the big stage at age five. It happened in 1894 on the stage of an English music hall.. His mother Anna, who was a theater singer, suddenly lost her voice on the day of the performance, and little Charlie replaced her, because he knew his mother’s entire repertoire by heart. The audience liked the boy's performance so much that they started throwing coins onto the stage.. Charlie, with childish spontaneity, began to crawl between the rows to collect his first fee, which caused an explosion of laughter in the audience and made the audience fall in love with him even more. It was a triumph.
When Charlie Chaplin became a movie star, he went down in history as the first actor in the world to sign a $1 million contract.. Now, of course, such a sum in the film industry will no longer surprise anyone, but in the 20s of the last century it was exorbitant money.
Almost became a farmer
Incredibly, the world might never have known about the great comedian Charlie Chaplin, because at the beginning of his career the actor himself wanted to devote himself to cattle breeding. When Charlie was 20 years old, he first traveled to the United States as part of an acting troupe.. In the States, the comedian met a circus performer from Chicago, who suggested the guy start breeding pigs. However, the castration procedure for piglets so impressed the actor that he decided to give up farming forever.
Lost in a competition of his own doubles
On the silver screen, Charlie Chaplin created the image of a good-natured tramp – a classic lyrical character with tragic features. This role became so popular in the USA, where Chaplin lived and worked, that the country began to regularly host competitions for the actor’s doubles in the image of a tramp.. Chaplin himself took part in one of these competitions, held at a fair in California in 1920.
Incredibly, but ironically, the actor took third place (according to some sources – second) in the competition of his own understudies.
Was Hitler's personal enemy
In 1940, Charlie Chaplin released a film that became an absolute classic of world cinema – The Great Dictator.. In the film in the genre of political satire, the actor ridiculed Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the Third Reich.
This was Chaplin's first work in sound film.. Moreover, the actor personally wrote the script for the film, acted as its director, producer and invested $1.5 million of personal funds (a huge amount of money at that time).
If The Great Dictator had failed at the box office, Charlie Chaplin would have gone bankrupt.. And there was such a possibility, because critics were very reserved in their assessment of the film: at the 13th Academy Awards ceremony, the film “The Great Dictator” received five nominations at once, including nominations for best film and best actor, but the film “flew by”. But the general public received it very well (the film was even shown during the bombing of London to raise the morale of the British), and The Great Dictator earned $5 million.
The tape was sent to Hitler. After watching the film, the dictator declared the actor a personal enemy, and Chaplin’s films were banned in Nazi Germany and the countries it occupied.
Lived under close surveillance by secret services
Charlie Chaplin became an actor and achieved success in the USA, where he lived for 40 years, but never received citizenship of this country.. All because of problems with the US authorities, which haunted the comedian all his life.
The fact is that American high-ranking officials suspected Charlie of having connections with the US communists, and his film “Modern Times” was interpreted as sympathetic to the leftist ideas of that time. On the instructions of the first FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who called the comedian “Hollywood's leading communist,” an impressive dossier was compiled on Charlie Chaplin. In addition, US intelligence agencies turned to the British counterintelligence MI5 with a request to discover suspicious facts about the actor’s past.
In the early 1950s, Chaplin went to Europe to present a new film. Taking advantage of this, the American authorities canceled the actor’s visa. The comedian returned to the USA only in 1972, when he received an Oscar for his contribution to cinema, but did not stay in the States.
Lover Hero
Despite the fact that on the screen Chaplin created the image of a stupid simpleton, in life the great comedian was also a womanizer.
Charlie was officially married four times. Chaplin entered into his first marriage, with actress Mildred Harris, when he was 28 years old and his wife was only 16. The future wife announced that she was pregnant, and the couple formalized their relationship.
Chaplin's second wife is actress Lita Gray. She also admitted to Charlie that she was pregnant, and the couple married in Mexico, since the bride was only 16 and Chaplin was 35.
After his divorce from Gray, the great comedian, who was 44 at the time, met 19-year-old Paulette Goddard. This marriage lasted eight years, but the actor's true love was the daughter of the famous American playwright Eugene O'Neill – Una O'Neill. The woman gave birth to eight children to Charlie and, despite the age difference of 36 years, the actor was married to Una for 35 years, until his death.
Was buried twice
Even after death, incredible adventures accompanied the great actor.. Charlie Chaplin died in 1977 and was buried in Switzerland at the Corsier-sur-Veuey cemetery. And the very next year, two intruders dug up the grave and stole the comedian’s body. So the scammers tried to hit the jackpot and demanded a ransom of 500 thousand pounds sterling from Chaplin’s relatives for the return of the body.
The actor's widow refused to pay and contacted the police. Law enforcement officers hunted for the perpetrators for more than a month and finally found them. They turned out to be a Pole and a Bulgarian who hid the body of the legendary actor in the middle of a corn field.
The scammers were convicted, and Charlie Chaplin's body was returned to his grave, covered with a massive concrete slab so that no one else could violate the legend.