Hollywoodland

Today is the birthday of the legendary silent movie actor Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889 in London, England. Both his parents were entertainers on the stage. He’s probably the most famous silent movie star of all time.

After a two year tour of the U.S. in 1910-1912, Chaplin returned to England, but came back to the U.S. after five months and eventually arrived in Hollywood and went to work for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company (home of the Keystone Kops). Within his first year with Keystone, he made 34 shorts some of which he directed himself.

By 1916, he’d moved studios twice and landed at Mutual Film Corporation. They paid him $670,000 to produce a dozen two-reel comedies. That would come out to approximately $13 million nowadays.

Around 1917-18, Chaplin built his own studio (now it’s a owned by the Jim Henson folks). In 1919, he formed United Artists with fellow actors/directors Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith in an effort to gain more control over their pictures.

Charlie once entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest in San Francisco. He didn’t win!

Chaplin had a repuation as a ladies man and was married four times. His first wife was child-actress Mildred Harris (she was 16 when they married, he was 29). They were married in 1918 and divorced in 1921. In 1924, he married Lita Grey (he was 35, she was 16—notice a theme?). They divorced in 1927. In 1936, he was supposedly married to actress Paulette Goddard but people suspect this wasn’t true and they were just trying to avoid destroying her career after they broke up (they’d been living together). In 1943, he married Oona O’Neill, the daughter of Eugene O’Neill (Chaplin was 54, Oona was 18). Their marriage lasted until Chaplin’s death in 1977.

In addition to all his marriages, Chaplin had affairs with actresses Edna Purviance, Pola Negri, Georgia Hale, and Louise Brooks.

He died December 25, 1977 in Switzerland.

Some classic Chaplin quotes:

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born. (Presumably this is about the Little Tramp.)

(And he has a brief cameo in my 1920s murder mystery. )

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