A hundred years ago, Charlie Chaplin was the biggest film comedian in the United States. Drawing on the pantomime he’d mastered in the British music halls, the 25-year-old expatriate had pioneered a new style of slapstick comedy in American silent films, more leisurely and character based than the frantic action of the Keystone Cops, and moviegoers were enthralled. As Peter Ackroyd recounts in his new biography Chaplin: A Brief Life, Chaplin’s fame spread around the world in 1915, his character the Tramp becoming a beloved figure to some 300 million people. He was celebrated in books, songs, comic strips, and nursery rhymes; the Tramp was merchandised with dolls, toys, clothing, charms, and plaster statuettes. Chaplin imitators adopted his signature costume of bowler hat, square mustache, too-small coat, bamboo cane, baggy pants, and oversize shoes; that summer at Luna Park, an amusement park in Cleveland, a crowd turned out for a Chaplin impersonation contest. The winner was a local 12-year-old who, 30 years later, would himself become the biggest film comedian in the U.S., performing as Bob Hope.

The music halls were the British equivalent of vaudeville—cheap, crowd-pleasing, lower-class entertainment—and from them Chaplin learned the traditional pantomime that would stand him in such good stead on the screen. “Movement is liberated thought,” he told an interviewer in 1942; when shooting a movie, he always made sure his feet were in the frame so people could see his whole body. He made a name for himself in England with the Fred Karno comedy troupe and in 1910 accompanied Karno to the U.S. for a vaudeville tour. When Chaplin was hired by the Keystone Studios in late 1913, he immediately distinguished himself with his elegant body language, and after a few appearances he came up with the Tramp character, an immediate hit. Comparing Chaplin with Ford Sterling, chief of the Keystone Cops, Ackroyd pinpoints the innovation that made the young Brit a star overnight: Sterling specialized in “florid gestures, exaggerated expressions and a general tendency to be over-theatrical. . . . Chaplin was in contrast more contained and much stiller . . . Sterling had only an outer, while Chaplin possessed an inner, life.”

Twenty years earlier, Americans had looked at the Tramp and seen themselves. The essence of the character, Ackroyd notes, can be seen in the famous final shot of The Tramp (1915), when Chaplin trudges sadly down a country lane, his back to the audience, but then rouses himself: “His little dance upon the road is a form of self-definition. He is free. He is essentially alone but he will never truly be lonely because he is infinitely resourceful. . . . He has the will to live in a world that may not be worth living in. The open road is an important conclusion to him; it implies an endless journey, with the Tramp implicitly in the role of Everyman.” But that was a different America, and silent movies a different medium. By the time Hope and Chaplin met, the older man had spent more than a decade trying to ignore the advent of sound: his only two movies since then, City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1935), were both silent, as anachronistic as they were brilliant.

In the end both men saw their cherished relationships with the public turn bitter. World War II may have made Hope, but it unmade Chaplin. “Patriotism is the greatest insanity the world has ever suffered,” he had declared during another trip to London in 1931, and American critics were incensed by the Tramp’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator: “Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to these brutes . . . who will drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, and use you as cannon fodder.” His absence from the USO circuit was noted, and after the war his pro-Soviet sympathies landed him in the crosshairs of the House Un-American Activities Committee. His black comedy Monsieur Verdoux (1947), in which he plays a wealthy serial killer, was vilified as an attack on American mores, and in 1952, while he was overseas promoting his nostalgic drama Limelight, he was denied reentry into the U.S. unless he would submit to an FBI investigation of his political affiliations. For the rest of his life, he made his home in Switzerland.

by Peter Ackroyd (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin (Simon & Schuster)