Charlie chaplin career timeline

Charlie Chaplin was the first global celebrity — and he used his fame to speak up for Jews. By James Mottram. The Little Tramp is back. The Real Charlie Chaplin, the new documentary by British filmmakers James Spinney and Peter Middleton, invites viewers to reconsider the silent movie star. As the title suggests, it attempts to go behind the Tramp, the bowler hat-wearing vagrant with that all-too-familiar moustache that became his on-screen persona.

And a type of fame that really began with him. Before Chaplin, people had never been famous in that particular way. When he first steps on screen, films are just beginning to spread across the world. By , his films are regularly being watched by hundreds of millions of people across different continents. The psychological disconnect that [he must have felt] is really striking.

The Great Depression, for example, is commented upon in Modern Times , a film about increased mechanisation. But it was the Second World War that, perhaps, came to define him.

What is charlie chaplin most famous for

For years, Chaplin had been thought of as Jewish, either by antisemites or Jews themselves. A film that satirised Adolf Hitler, Chaplin famously played both a fascist leader, Adenoid Henkel and a Jewish barber. And Chaplin was calling Hitler out from very, very early on and stood to lose quite a lot with that film.