Before the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin was a workhouse boy sleeping rough in London
Charlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse twice before he turned nine, and at 14 he had to take his own mother to the infirmary before she returned to an asylum. Within a decade he was earning $150 a week in Los Angeles, and by 1918 few people on earth were better known.
Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889, probably in Walworth, South London, though no official birth record exists. Both parents worked the music halls: his mother Hannah sang briefly as Lily Harley, and his father, a butcher's son, was a popular singer who drifted into alcoholism, gave the family nothing and died of cirrhosis at 38. His biographer David Robinson called the boy's later ascent the most dramatic rags-to-riches tale ever told.
The poverty was relentless. At seven Chaplin entered Lambeth Workhouse and a school for paupers; in 1898 Hannah was committed to Cane Hill asylum with psychosis apparently linked to syphilis and malnutrition. When she relapsed in 1903 he lived alone for days, hunting for food, until his half-brother Sydney came home from the Navy. From 1905 her illness never lifted, and she stayed in care until 1928.
The stage was his escape route. He toured with the Eight Lancashire Lads clog dancers, played Billy the pageboy in Sherlock Holmes, appearing opposite William Gillette in the West End at 16, and then joined Fred Karno's comedy company, where Sydney had already become a leading performer. Karno at first thought him a pale, sullen youngster, but a drunk known as the Inebriate Swell made him a hit on North American vaudeville tours, alongside a young Stan Laurel.
Keystone Studios signed him in September 1913, and his screen debut, Making a Living, came out on 2 February 1914. He hated it. For his next appearance he chose the costume that became the Tramp. By 1919 he had co-founded United Artists, gaining full control of his work, and he kept silent films like City Lights going into the sound era. The Great Dictator (1940), his first talkie, mocked Hitler. Accused of communist sympathies and dogged by scandal, he left the US in 1952 for Switzerland, receiving an Honorary Academy Award in 1972.
Source: Charlie Chaplin
