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Every few weeks, outside the movie theater in virtually any American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp–outfitted in tattered, baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat–bearing the inscription I AM HERE TODAY. An advertisement for a Charlie Chaplin film was a promise of happiness, of that precious, almost shocking moment when art delivers what life cannot, when experience and delight become synonymous, and our investments yield the fabulous, unmerited bonanza we never get past expecting.

Eighty years later, Chaplin is still here. In a 1995 worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process–founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly moviegoing was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognizability and helped turn an industry into an art. In 1916, his third year in films, his salary of $10,000 a week made him the highest- paid actor–possibly the highest paid person–in the world. By 1920, “Chaplinitis,” accompanied by a flood of Chaplin dances, songs, dolls, comic books and cocktails, was rampant. Filmmaker Mack Sennett thought him “just the greatest artist who ever lived.” Other early admirers included George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. In 1923 Hart Crane, who wrote a poem about Chaplin, said his pantomime “represents the futile gesture of the poet today.” Later, in the 1950s, Chaplin was one of the icons of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac went on the road because he too wanted to be a hobo. From 1981 to 1987, IBM used the Tramp as the logo to advertise its venture into personal computers.

Born in London in 1889, Chaplin spent his childhood in shabby furnished rooms, state poorhouses and an orphanage. He was never sure who his real father was; his mother’s husband Charles Chaplin, a singer, deserted the family early and died of alcoholism in 1901. His mother Hannah, a small-time actress, was in and out of mental hospitals. Though he pursued learning passionately in later years, young Charlie left school at 10 to work as a mime and roustabout on the British vaudeville circuit. The poverty of his early years inspired the Tramp’s trademark costume, a creative travesty of formal dinner dress suggesting the authoritative adult reimagined by a clear-eyed child, the guilty class reinvented in the image of the innocent one. His “little fellow” was the expression of a wildly sentimental, deeply felt allegiance to rags over riches by the star of the century’s most conspicuous Horatio Alger scenario.

From the start, his extraordinary athleticism, expressive grace, impeccable timing, endless inventiveness and genius for hard work set Chaplin apart. In 1910 he made his first trip to America, with Fred Karno’s Speechless Comedians. In 1913 he joined Sennett’s Keystone Studios in New York City. Although his first film, Making a Living (1914), brought him nationwide praise, he was unhappy with the slapstick speed, cop chases and bathing-beauty escapades that were Sennett’s specialty. The advent of movies in the late 1890s had brought full visibility to the human personality, to the corporeal self that print, the dominant medium before film, could only describe and abstract. In a Sennett comedy, speechlessness raised itself to a racket, but Chaplin instinctively understood that visibility needs leisure as well as silence to work its most intimate magic.

The actor, not the camera, did the acting in his films. Never a formal innovator, Chaplin found his persona and plot early and never totally abandoned them. For 13 years, he resisted talking pictures, launched with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Even then, the talkies he made, among them the masterpieces The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952), were daringly far-flung variations on his greatest silent films, The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights (1931).

The terrifyingly comic Adenoid Hynkel (a takeoff on Hitler), whom Chaplin played in The Great Dictator, or M. Verdoux, the sardonic mass murderer of middle-aged women, may seem drastic departures from the “little fellow,” but the Tramp is always ambivalent and many-sided. Funniest when he is most afraid, mincing and smirking as he attempts to placate those immune to pacification, constantly susceptible to reprogramming by nearby bodies or machines, skidding around a corner or sliding seamlessly from a pat to a shove while desire and doubt chase each other across his face, the Tramp is never unself-conscious, never free of calculation, never anything but a hard-pressed if often divinely lighthearted member of an endangered species, entitled to any means of defense he can devise. Faced with a frequently malign universe, he can never quite bring himself to choose between his pleasure in the improvisatory shifts of strategic retreat and his impulse to love some creature palpably weaker and more threatened than himself.

When a character in Monsieur Verdoux remarks that if the unborn knew of the approach of life, they would dread it as much as the living do death, Chaplin was simply spelling out what we’ve known all along. The Tramp, it seemed, was mute not by necessity but by choice. He’d tried to protect us from his thoughts, but if the times insisted that he tell what he saw as well as what he was, he could only reveal that the innocent chaos of comedy depends on a mania for control, that the cruelest of ironies attend the most heartfelt invocations of pathos. Speech is the language of hatred as silence is that of love.

On Chaplin’s first night in New York in September 1910, he walked around the theater district, dazzled by its lights and movement. “This is it!” he told himself. “This is where I belong!” Yet he never became a U.S. citizen. An internationalist by temperament and fame, he considered patriotism “the greatest insanity that the world has ever suffered.” As the Depression gave way to World War II and the cold war, the increasingly politicized message of his films, his expressed sympathies with pacifists, communists and Soviet supporters, became suspect. It didn’t help that Chaplin, a bafflingly complex and private man, had a weakness for young girls. His first two wives were 16 when he married them; his last, Oona O’Neill, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, was 18. In 1943 he was the defendant in a public, protracted paternity suit. Denouncing his “leering, sneering attitude” toward the U.S. and his “unsavory” morals, various public officials, citizen groups and gossip columnists led a boycott of his pictures.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI put together a dossier on Chaplin that reached almost 2,000 pages. Wrongly identifying him as “Israel Thonstein,” a Jew passing for a gentile, the FBI found no evidence that he had ever belonged to the Communist Party or engaged in treasonous activity. In 1952, however, two days after Chaplin sailed for England to promote Limelight, Attorney General James McGranery revoked his re-entry permit. Loathing the witch-hunts and “moral pomposity” of the cold war U.S., and believing he had “lost the affections” of the American public, Chaplin settled with Oona and their family in Switzerland (where he died in 1977).

With the advent of the ’60s and the Vietnam War, Chaplin’s American fortunes turned. He orchestrated a festival of his films in New York in 1963. Amid the loudest and longest ovation in its history, he accepted a special Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1972. There were dissenters. Governor Ronald Reagan, for one, believed the government did the right thing in 1952. During the 1972 visit, Chaplin, at 83, said he’d long ago given up radical politics, a welcome remark in a nation where popular favor has often been synonymous with depoliticization. But the ravishing charm and brilliance of his films are inseparable from his convictions.

At the end of City Lights, when the heroine at last sees the man who has delivered her from blindness, we watch her romantic dreams die. “You?” she asks, incredulous. “Yes,” the Tramp nods, his face, caught in extreme close-up, a map of pride, shame and devotion. It’s the oldest story in show business–the last shall yet be, if not first, at least recognized, and perhaps even loved.

Ann Douglas is the author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s

How We Came To Think “They’ve Killed Kenny!” Is Funny

As humor became the culture’s biggest currency, the jester used his free pass to become society’s truth teller — not only by questioning authority but also by sharing his most intimate neuroses.

GROUCHO MARX Media: Vaudeville, film, TV Trademark: A trickster who mixed fast, irreverent, smart-ass banter with broad physical comedy. Classic Routine: The “Why a duck?” bit with brother Chico from Cocoanuts.

BOB HOPE Media: Stage, radio, film, TV Trademark: Lovable chicken-heart in films; dapper wiseacre in stand-up. Classic Routine: Cascade of topical one-liners ribbing Presidents, celebrities and Ann-Margret’s physique.

LENNY BRUCE Medium: Stand-up Trademark: Blue material led to arrests — which provided lots of material about the First Amendment. Classic Routine: Yiddish-trained cops nailing him for using the word schmuck.

WOODY ALLEN Media: Stand-up, fiction, film Trademark: A stammering nerd obsessing over his neuroses. Classic Routine: Whining to his therapist that he’s not having enough sex while his lover says just the opposite in Annie Hall.

RICHARD PRYOR Media: Stand-up, film Trademark: Angry, highly personal, profanity-drenched tirades about race. Classic Routine: Mudbone, an old wino savant, talks about how stupid white people are.

MONTY PYTHON Media: TV, film Trademark: Absurdist, erudite, antiauthoritarian sketches. Classic Routine: The dead-parrot sketch, in which John Cleese tries to return a bird sold to him already deceased.

Credit: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988499-3,00.html

Memories of Chaplin in L.A.

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Despite the fact he found Los Angeles “an ugly city, hot and oppressive,” Charlie Chaplin lived and worked here from late December, 1913, when he joined Mack Sennett’s Keystone Co., to Sept. 6, 1952, when he left for England, later to be barredfrom returning to the United States by the federal government.

In four decades here, he became perhaps the planet’s most celebrated person of his the and made films that will endure–just as he suspected that Northern California would endure long after “Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar pits of Wilshire Boulevard.”

The years since his 1952 exile have taken their toll on Chaplin’s Los Angeles, but history and developers have yet to wipe him from the scene–totally. The Charles Chaplin Studios still stand at LaBrea Avenue and DeLongpre Avenue, now home of A & M Records. The Georgian-style mansion in which he lived from 1920 remains on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills, its current owner the financially troubled Adnan Khashoggi.

Still standing too is the Circle Theater, on El Centro Avenue, in Hollywood, a converted drugstore where a group of young actors, including Chaplin’s son Sydney Chaplin, were directed anonymously by the star who sought artistic haven from troubled times. These days, the Circle Theater continues in operation.

But most indestructible among these physical remembrances are the personal memories many have of Chaplin and his days here.

NORMAN LLOYD, actor, producer and featured player in “Limelight.”

Lloyd became a friend and business partner of Chaplin’s after first meeting him on the tennis courts of Summit Drive. “He was a kind of 19th-Century genius,” says Lloyd, who was a regular on “St. Elsewhere” and appears in the upcoming “The Dead Poets Society.” “He was romantic, poetic–from another era, really.”

Acting as producer, director, writer, choreographer and composer, few details escaped Chaplin’s attention during the making of “Limelight.” ” ‘Rightly to be great . . . is to find quarrel in a straw,’ ” Lloyd says, paraphrasing Hamlet. “That was Charlie. There was nothing too minute, everything was important.”

Every experience was important, as well. With all his success, he couldn’t wipe away his childhood workhouse days. Lloyd recalls an episode at the house when 10-year-old Michael Chaplin was dragging a sweater along the ground. “Charlie said, ‘Get that up off the ground! People had to work for that!’ He always said, ‘I don’t believe I deserve dinner unless I do a day’s work.’ ”

SYDNEY CHAPLIN, retired actor, owner of “Chaplin’s” restaurant in Rancho Mirage.

chapman university campus : http://www.chapmanschools.org/about/campus/index.aspx

Sydney was born in the house at 1085 Summit Drive, as was his older brother, Charlie Jr. His parents divorced before Sydney was a year old and the boys were relegated to weekend visits to the house. Sydney remembers tennis games, swims in the pools and stepmother Paulette Goddard pulling them out of school for trips to Catalina on the Chaplin yacht, Panacea. “She was great with us,” he says. His father was less available.

“Sometimes he was fun to be around,” Sydney says, “but mainly he was preoccupied with his work. When I grew up we had more in common.”

Sydney joined the Circle Theater at age 21, and Charles directed him in a number of productions. “It wasn’t bad working with my father,” he says, “but he was tough on me always. He wanted me to be better than the other people in the show.”

Sydney went on to play leads in “Lime light” (1952) and “A Countess From Hong Kong” (1967). Onstage, he won a Tony starring opposite Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.” Brother Charlie Jr. had less luck with his theatrical interest and died at 42, an alcoholic. Sydney isn’t a believer in inherited talent.

“Just because your family is in a business, that helps put you in it,” he says. “If your father was a coal miner, you’d probably be one too.”

GLORIA DeHAVEN, actress.

At age 9, Gloria DeHaven accidentally launched her acting career with a visit to the set of “Modern Times,” where her father, Carter DeHaven, was assistant director. Chaplin needed two little girls to play Paulette Goddard’s sisters. Gloria and her schoolmate were picked on the spot. “Mr. Chaplin said, ‘They’re perfect.’ All we would have to do was wear tattered clothes, eat bananas and run away from a truant officer,” DeHaven says, laughing at the memory. They were sent to Western Costume for tattering, came back to the set and “had a marvelous time.”

Afterward, they were all invited to his house. She was stunned to discover that, out of costume and on the tennis court, the funny little tramp was an “awesomely attractive man. He had a wonderful physique, tanned and very attractive. Then he came in and played the piano, told stories. There wasn’t anything that he couldn’t do. I was totally dazzled by him.”

LITA GREY. Retired performer, Chaplin’s second wife and mother to Sydney and Charles Jr.

Lita Grey gave birth to both her sons in a hospital-equipped delivery room in the mansion on Summit Drive and says that she spent many nights waiting alone there for her husband to come home.

Chaplin, then 35, had cast the 16-year-old actress as his leading lady in “The Gold Rush” but had to replace her in the role when she became pregnant by him. The marriage, she says, was forced by her family. “He backed out at first.”

Their divorce played for nine months in court and made international headlines for far longer. It caused Chaplin to have a nervous breakdown and is said to have turned his hair prematurely gray–Lita is the only one of his four wives whom he does not mention by name in his 1964 autobiography.

“He was a very difficult man to be with,” Grey, now in her 80s and living in an apartment in West Hollywood, says. “He was a genius, but hard to reach, with a big ego and terribly insecure.”

Of his notorious attraction to young women, she believes: “He’d try to create people. He enjoyed being the first person in a girl’s life.”

She doesn’t believe that he ever warmed to fatherhood. “He was never one to cuddle and kiss his children. He was always very objective around them. He looked as if he was examining them. He saw everyone in a frame.

“Charlie Jr. sought his father’s love and approval all his life,” she says. “Sydney was well aware of his father’s faults, but he didn’t let them affect him. Charlie was different, he needed his father.”

After the divorce, she launched a lengthy career in vaudeville and nightclubs as Lita Grey Chaplin. “The name was a definite advantage,” Grey says. “But when they overpublicized it, when they said the ex-wife of Charlie Chaplin, I made them take that down.”

WILLIAM SCHALLERT, actor, former president of the Screen Actors’ Guild.

Schallert, perhaps best known as Patty Duke’s television dad, was directed by Chaplin in a number of Circle Theater productions. It was a heady experience for a young actor, particularly in a theater that Schallert remembers fondly as a “rickey tick operation,” with barely 100 seats and a small, in-the-round stage.

Chaplin’s involvement with the group began shyly, as if testing for acceptance, then became total. “After a preview performance,” Schallert says, “he’d say, ‘There are just a couple of things I want to suggest.’ Then he’d start at the top of the play and work his way through the entire first act. When it was about 5 or 6 in the morning, Oona (Chaplin’s wife) would finally say, ‘Come on Charlie, let them go home, they’ve got a performance to do tonight.’ Then they’d drive off in his little old black Ford.

“We’d end up redoing the play two and three times in two to three nights. By opening night, we’d be in a state. It was helter-skelter for inexperienced actors, but exciting. It was a remarkable process. It was like if you were a painter and working with Picasso. We had some rare treats,” Schallert says.

“There was something very endearing about the man. He’d work with us with unlimited enthusiasm and affection. Not openly affectionate. There was a little wall, there, in fact. He was always ‘Mr. Chaplin,’ but actions are always louder than words.”

JERRY EPSTEIN, producer, director and author of “Remembering Charlie: A Pictorial Biography,” published this month by Doubleday.

Epstein, founder of the Circle Theater, shared a friendship and professional relationship with Chaplin that lasted until the star’s death in 1977. Epstein, who produced Chaplin’s last film, “A Countess From Hong Kong,” feels that the Circle Theater, at the outset of the McCarthy era, “was good for (Chaplin) . . . to find people who adored him. We didn’t care about his politics. He was one of those isolated Hollywood figures, like Garbo, an untouchable, and here he was just looking for friendship.”

The young troupe learned perfectionism under Chaplin’s direction. “Charlie worked and worked until he got it right. He always told us that the audience should think that they’re looking through a keyhole. ‘I don’t want to see any acting!’ He was after absolute reality.”

Epstein recalls the long walks they would share on the streets of Los Angeles where Chaplin sought his own sense of reality. “He liked to see people, see how they lived. Everything ‘talked’ to him. His antennae were always out.”

The only thing he ever asked in payment for his work at the Circle was, “35 cents and a cup of black coffee.” And Chaplin was never gloomy about his pending personal problems. “He used to say he was like an old weed–you pull it out, but it just keeps coming back.”

Chaplin came back to Hollywood just once, in 1972, to accept a special Oscar. He chose not to visit any of his Los Angeles haunts during the visit.

Credit: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-16/entertainment/ca-2452_1_sydney-chaplin-chaplin-s-los-angeles-charlie-chaplin/2

Saturday 15 April 2017

Harry Styles' Appearance Is a 'Sign of the Times' on 'Saturday Night Live'

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Kevin Winter/Getty Images for iHeartMedia

Harry Styles of One Direction performs onstage during 106.1 KISS FM's Jingle Ball 2015 presented by Capital One at American Airlines Center on Dec. 1, 2015 in Dallas.

Harry Styles brought his A-game for his first post-One Direction visit to Saturday Night Live. He also brought a sharp suit, his Bowie-esque vocals, and some Beatles-style bass lines to the April 15 episode.

In addition to appearing in an opening monologue dance routine, a Family Feudsketch as Mick Jagger, and a Civil War boy band skit, Styles performed an intense rendition of his first solo single, “Sign of the Times,” from his forthcoming, self-titled debut album, just announced to release on May 12.

Styles' second performance, "Tell Me Something," closed with a few blissful bars of a capella and tight, multi-part harmony (and the band member in a maroon vintage tux didn't hurt, either).

The singer last graced the SNL stage in December 2014 with the rest of One Direction.

credit: http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/7760500/harry-styles-saturday-night-live

Happy Birthday Charlie Chaplin!

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April 16 marked Charlie Chaplin's 126th birth anniversary. Here is a look at some of the interesting chapters from his exuberant life.

Charlie Chaplin was born to Charles Chaplin, Sr. and Hannah Caplin who were both versatile singers and actors.

Chaplin was born in 1889 in Walworth, London. He started his career as a child artiste, appearing in "Sherlock Holmes" at the age of 12.

Charlie Chaplin met Mahatma Gandhi at the home of Dr. Katial in Canning Town, London in 1931. Chaplin had then asked Gandhiji the reason for his opposing the industrial revolution in India. "Your dharma is to eat with spoons and forks," said Gandhiji. "We Indians eat with our fingers. You need industry to produce them for you. We don't. Industry means different things to different cultures. Let us be." Charlie Chaplin wrote about this incident in his autobiography with the remark that Gandhiji had made one of the most intelligent remarks he had ever heard.

Charlie Chaplin, often referred to as one of the greatest comedian ever, clicked immediately with the audience with his first ever Hollywood venture. Chaplin won many awards in his 75 years in the movies. "The Circus" won the first Academy Award for Chaplin in 1929.

Chaplin wrote, produced, acted, and composed music for most of his films. He also had a colourful romantic life. In this picture, he is seen with his fourth wife Oona O'Neill. Chaplin first got married in 1918 to Mildred Harris but got divorced in 1920. Chaplin then got married to Lita Grey in 1924, got separated within two years followed by his marriage to Paulette Goddard, also an actor, in 1936 but got divorced in 1942. Chaplin died in 1977.

Credit: http://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/charlie-chaplins-126th-birth-anniversary/article7109578.ece

Charlie Chaplin: was the entertainer really born in Smethwick?

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Charlie Chaplin: was the entertainer really born in Smethwick?

David Gritten embraces new evidence disputing that Chaplin was born in London, as was previously thought, but in Smethwick.

It’s always been assumed that Charlie Chaplin was a Londoner, born in Lambeth in 1889. The city has always embraced him as one of its own – you need look no further than Leicester Square and its famous Chaplin statue as evidence.

So our capital city likes to claim it’s the birthplace of the two greatest Englishmen in film history – Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, born in Leytonstone 10 years later.

Now that claim is in dispute. Matthew Sweet, the erudite and entertaining film historian, has visited the Chaplin family home in Montreux, Switzerland, and inspected a Chaplin archive in a concrete vault. It contains letters, press cuttings and reel-to-reel recordings of him playing the piano.

But the most remarkable document of all is a letter to Chaplin from a man called Jack Hill, who in the 1970s was living in Tamworth, Staffordshire. He informed Chaplin that he was the nephew of a woman known as The Gypsy Queen, who at one point in her life lived in a caravan on a travellers’ site known as The Black Patch, in Smethwick, near Birmingham. This caravan, he informed Chaplin, was the place he had really been born.

Sweet, who presents a Radio 4 programme called The Chaplin Archive on Monday at 11 a.m., observes that Chaplin’s birth certificate has never been found, but his mother Hannah was descended from a family of travellers. Both Hannah and Chaplin’s father Charles Senior, were music hall entertainers and constantly on the move. Chaplin’s son Michael, who is now 64, believes Hill’s letter is ‘significant’ and quite possibly true.

I’d like to think so. My interest in this story is twofold. I write about film for a living, and Chaplin is a giant figure in film history – perhaps the biggest single name in over a century of cinema. And then there’s the fact that I’m from Smethwick myself. I lived there for the first 17 years of my life.

It’s a place with an unfashionable reputation, to put it mildly. To people of a certain age its very name is infamous, after Peter Griffiths was elected its Conservative MP in 1964, having conducted a notoriously racist campaign. Still, as a Smethwick boy, I feel protective of the place – and these days a variety of ethnic groups live there peaceably. Still, the notion that Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous figures of the 20th century, was born there would be good news for the town – which has now been incorporated into the metropolitan borough of Sandwell, but still retains its identity.

I remember the Black Patch slightly. It’s now a park, located right at the heart of this country’s Industrial Revolution, and it used to be surrounded by factories that formed the manufacturing hub of England. Many of those factories have closed their gates, but the park lives on – as does its legacy as home to travelling gypsies in the latter half of the 19th century.

I have a feeling the controversy about Chaplin’s birth won’t go away in a hurry. London has a vested interest in re-affirming itself as his birthplace. Me, I like to think that it was Smethwick all along, and this little corner of the Black Country was the place this legendary figure first drew breath.

Credit: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/8333101/Charlie-Chaplin-was-the-entertainer-really-born-in-Smethwick.html

Celebrate Charlie Chaplin’s 125th Birthday By Watching This Classic, Hilarious Clip

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Celebrate Charlie Chaplin's 125th Birthday By Watching This Classic, Hilarious Clip

Today marks the 125th year since the birth of one of cinema’s great pioneers. Charlie Chaplin, born on 16th April 1889, was responsible for many of the most exciting developments in the history of film-making.

He took theatrical traditions and made them new again for cinema with his distinctive filmic eye and comic genius. He thought in celluloid; he blended high and low art, comedy and tragedy, farce and sincerity. One of the few silent actors to make a successful transition to talkies, he always knew when and how to reinvent himself, and the media he worked in too.

A true legend and a hero to so many filmmakers and film lovers, myself included: Sir Charles, we here at /bent salute you.

So celebrate his birthday and raise a glass to Charlie whilst watching this wonderful clip from “The Circus” (1928) which features his iconic Tramp character.

Credit: http://www.indiewire.com/2014/04/celebrate-charlie-chaplins-125th-birthday-by-watching-this-classic-hilarious-clip-214370/

Happy 125th Birthday, Charlie!

sizzledfeed 22:22

Happy 125th Birthday, Charlie!

125 years ago today: BIRTH OF CHARLES CHAPLIN!

Credit: http://www.charliechaplin.com/en/infos/412-Happy-125th-Birthday-Charlie-

Thursday 13 April 2017

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Funny charlie video

Charlie Chaplin’s First Oscar Is Reported Stolen

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Charlie Chaplin’s First Oscar Is Reported Stolen
By

AURELIEN BREEDEN

PARIS – Charlie Chaplin’s 1929 honorary Oscar statuette was stolen in Paris late last month from the offices of the Association Chaplin, according to the organization.

The Association Chaplin is a Swiss organization, with Paris offices, that aims to protect the name, image and rights linked to Charlie Chaplin’s work. Its director, Kate Guyonvarch, could not provide additional details on the theft, but said via email, “We and the Chaplin family are extremely shaken by this loss, and trust that the police will get to the bottom of the break-in very soon.”

The French newspaper Le Parisien, quoting an anonymous police source, reported that several pens that had belonged to the British star were also stolen and that each was worth 80,000 euros. The same source told Le Parisien that the burglary was the work of “perfectly informed” individuals who had specifically targeted the Chaplin memorabilia.

Some pre-1950 statuettes have fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars in auctions. (These days, a winner wishing to sell an Oscar must offer the Academy the opportunity to buy it back for $1. That rule does not apply to older statuettes.)

Mr. Chaplin, who died in 1977 at the age of 88, received the honorary Oscar during the very first Academy Awards in 1929 for “acting, writing, directing and producing ‘The Circus,’” which featured Mr. Chaplin’s iconic Tramp, the disheveled and bumbling character he portrayed in many of his silent films.

Mr. Chaplin also received an honorary Oscar in 1972, “for the incalculable effect he had in making motion pictures the art form of this century,” but was awarded only one regular Academy Award throughout his whole career, for the score of “Limelight,” in 1973.

A representative for the Association Chaplin said the organization had been planning to lend the 1929 award to a museum dedicated to Charlie Chaplin that is opening next year in Switzerland, where the actor spent the last 25 years of his life.

Credit:https://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/charlie-chaplins-first-oscar-is-reported-stolen/?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FChaplin%2C%20Charles&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&_r=1&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Movies&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=Blogs

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Memories of Chaplin in L.A.

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Memories of Chaplin in L.A.

NANCY SPILLER

Despite the fact he found Los Angeles "an ugly city, hot and oppressive," Charlie Chaplin lived and worked here from late December, 1913, when he joined Mack Sennett's Keystone Co., to Sept. 6, 1952, when he left for England, later to be barredfrom returning to the United States by the federal government.

In four decades here, he became perhaps the planet's most celebrated person of his the and made films that will endure--just as he suspected that Northern California would endure long after "Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar pits of Wilshire Boulevard."

The years since his 1952 exile have taken their toll on Chaplin's Los Angeles, but history and developers have yet to wipe him from the scene--totally. The Charles Chaplin Studios still stand at LaBrea Avenue and DeLongpre Avenue, now home of A & M Records. The Georgian-style mansion in which he lived from 1920 remains on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills, its current owner the financially troubled Adnan Khashoggi.

Still standing too is the Circle Theater, on El Centro Avenue, in Hollywood, a converted drugstore where a group of young actors, including Chaplin's son Sydney Chaplin, were directed anonymously by the star who sought artistic haven from troubled times. These days, the Circle Theater continues in operation.

But most indestructible among these physical remembrances are the personal memories many have of Chaplin and his days here.

NORMAN LLOYD, actor, producer and featured player in "Limelight."

Lloyd became a friend and business partner of Chaplin's after first meeting him on the tennis courts of Summit Drive. "He was a kind of 19th-Century genius," says Lloyd, who was a regular on "St. Elsewhere" and appears in the upcoming "The Dead Poets Society." "He was romantic, poetic--from another era, really."

Acting as producer, director, writer, choreographer and composer, few details escaped Chaplin's attention during the making of "Limelight." " 'Rightly to be great . . . is to find quarrel in a straw,' " Lloyd says, paraphrasing Hamlet. "That was Charlie. There was nothing too minute, everything was important."

Every experience was important, as well. With all his success, he couldn't wipe away his childhood workhouse days. Lloyd recalls an episode at the house when 10-year-old Michael Chaplin was dragging a sweater along the ground. "Charlie said, 'Get that up off the ground! People had to work for that!' He always said, 'I don't believe I deserve dinner unless I do a day's work.' "

SYDNEY CHAPLIN, retired actor, owner of "Chaplin's" restaurant in Rancho Mirage.

Sydney was born in the house at 1085 Summit Drive, as was his older brother, Charlie Jr. His parents divorced before Sydney was a year old and the boys were relegated to weekend visits to the house. Sydney remembers tennis games, swims in the pools and stepmother Paulette Goddard pulling them out of school for trips to Catalina on the Chaplin yacht, Panacea. "She was great with us," he says. His father was less available.

"Sometimes he was fun to be around," Sydney says, "but mainly he was preoccupied with his work. When I grew up we had more in common."

Sydney joined the Circle Theater at age 21, and Charles directed him in a number of productions. "It wasn't bad working with my father," he says, "but he was tough on me always. He wanted me to be better than the other people in the show."

Sydney went on to play leads in "Lime light" (1952) and "A Countess From Hong Kong" (1967). Onstage, he won a Tony starring opposite Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl." Brother Charlie Jr. had less luck with his theatrical interest and died at 42, an alcoholic. Sydney isn't a believer in inherited talent.

"Just because your family is in a business, that helps put you in it," he says. "If your father was a coal miner, you'd probably be one too."

GLORIA DeHAVEN, actress.

At age 9, Gloria DeHaven accidentally launched her acting career with a visit to the set of "Modern Times," where her father, Carter DeHaven, was assistant director. Chaplin needed two little girls to play Paulette Goddard's sisters. Gloria and her schoolmate were picked on the spot. "Mr. Chaplin said, 'They're perfect.' All we would have to do was wear tattered clothes, eat bananas and run away from a truant officer," DeHaven says, laughing at the memory. They were sent to Western Costume for tattering, came back to the set and "had a marvelous time."

Afterward, they were all invited to his house. She was stunned to discover that, out of costume and on the tennis court, the funny little tramp was an "awesomely attractive man. He had a wonderful physique, tanned and very attractive. Then he came in and played the piano, told stories. There wasn't anything that he couldn't do. I was totally dazzled by him."

LITA GREY. Retired performer, Chaplin's second wife and mother to Sydney and Charles Jr.

Lita Grey gave birth to both her sons in a hospital-equipped delivery room in the mansion on Summit Drive and says that she spent many nights waiting alone there for her husband to come home.

Chaplin, then 35, had cast the 16-year-old actress as his leading lady in "The Gold Rush" but had to replace her in the role when she became pregnant by him. The marriage, she says, was forced by her family. "He backed out at first."

Their divorce played for nine months in court and made international headlines for far longer. It caused Chaplin to have a nervous breakdown and is said to have turned his hair prematurely gray--Lita is the only one of his four wives whom he does not mention by name in his 1964 autobiography.

"He was a very difficult man to be with," Grey, now in her 80s and living in an apartment in West Hollywood, says. "He was a genius, but hard to reach, with a big ego and terribly insecure."

Of his notorious attraction to young women, she believes: "He'd try to create people. He enjoyed being the first person in a girl's life."

She doesn't believe that he ever warmed to fatherhood. "He was never one to cuddle and kiss his children. He was always very objective around them. He looked as if he was examining them. He saw everyone in a frame.

"Charlie Jr. sought his father's love and approval all his life," she says. "Sydney was well aware of his father's faults, but he didn't let them affect him. Charlie was different, he needed his father."

After the divorce, she launched a lengthy career in vaudeville and nightclubs as Lita Grey Chaplin. "The name was a definite advantage," Grey says. "But when they overpublicized it, when they said the ex-wife of Charlie Chaplin, I made them take that down."

WILLIAM SCHALLERT, actor, former president of the Screen Actors' Guild.

Schallert, perhaps best known as Patty Duke's television dad, was directed by Chaplin in a number of Circle Theater productions. It was a heady experience for a young actor, particularly in a theater that Schallert remembers fondly as a "rickey tick operation," with barely 100 seats and a small, in-the-round stage.

Chaplin's involvement with the group began shyly, as if testing for acceptance, then became total. "After a preview performance," Schallert says, "he'd say, 'There are just a couple of things I want to suggest.' Then he'd start at the top of the play and work his way through the entire first act. When it was about 5 or 6 in the morning, Oona (Chaplin's wife) would finally say, 'Come on Charlie, let them go home, they've got a performance to do tonight.' Then they'd drive off in his little old black Ford.

"We'd end up redoing the play two and three times in two to three nights. By opening night, we'd be in a state. It was helter-skelter for inexperienced actors, but exciting. It was a remarkable process. It was like if you were a painter and working with Picasso. We had some rare treats," Schallert says.

"There was something very endearing about the man. He'd work with us with unlimited enthusiasm and affection. Not openly affectionate. There was a little wall, there, in fact. He was always 'Mr. Chaplin,' but actions are always louder than words."

----

JERRY EPSTEIN, producer, director and author of "Remembering Charlie: A Pictorial Biography," published this month by Doubleday.

Epstein, founder of the Circle Theater, shared a friendship and professional relationship with Chaplin that lasted until the star's death in 1977. Epstein, who produced Chaplin's last film, "A Countess From Hong Kong," feels that the Circle Theater, at the outset of the McCarthy era, "was good for (Chaplin) . . . to find people who adored him. We didn't care about his politics. He was one of those isolated Hollywood figures, like Garbo, an untouchable, and here he was just looking for friendship."

The young troupe learned perfectionism under Chaplin's direction. "Charlie worked and worked until he got it right. He always told us that the audience should think that they're looking through a keyhole. 'I don't want to see any acting!' He was after absolute reality."

Epstein recalls the long walks they would share on the streets of Los Angeles where Chaplin sought his own sense of reality. "He liked to see people, see how they lived. Everything 'talked' to him. His antennae were always out."

The only thing he ever asked in payment for his work at the Circle was, "35 cents and a cup of black coffee." And Chaplin was never gloomy about his pending personal problems. "He used to say he was like an old weed--you pull it out, but it just keeps coming back."

Chaplin came back to Hollywood just once, in 1972, to accept a special Oscar. He chose not to visit any of his Los Angeles haunts during the visit.

Credit: http://articles.latimes.com/1989-04-16/entertainment/ca-2452_1_sydney-chaplin-chaplin-s-los-angeles-charlie-chaplin

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