Welcome to the official  web site CAIUS ZIP - The Time Traveler    

                             (1889- 1977)

  Some of his films made by United Artists, are:

 The Gold Rush (1925), Chaplin’s favourite masterpiece. In this film, the master of pantomime plays the role of a tramp that tries his luck in Klondike, in Alaska, during the Gold Rush. He performs the most memorable and famous sequence of his films, “the dance of the bread rolls” and the comical scene where he cooks and eats his boot. Despite the considerable cost of six and a half million dollars, excessive for the standards of that time, this film rendered him the most profit and popularity.

In the fiction book, "Caius Zip in: Einstein, Picasso,  Chaplin and Agatha", you get the chance to read about this great comedian in 1905 when he was only 16 years old, as he helps Caius and Agatha solve a crime. You can also witness the birth of the Theory of Relativity and of Cubism. Different, aren’t they?  

See a PASSAGE OF THE BOOK

CAIUS ZIP IN:

EINSTEIN, PICASSO, AGATHA and CHAPLIN 

  Sir Charles "Charlie" Spencer or Chaplin was born on the 16th of April of 1889 at 8pm. in a London suburb.

Son of a baritone singer (Charles Chaplin) and the actress Lily Harvey (Hannah Harriet Hill), both of which were music-hall performers.
 

 Sydney, Chaplin’s half-brother, was the son of Hannah’s first marriage to a man that is mostly unknown to this day. His mother became a music-hall singer and there met Chaplin’s father. They married and her husband adopted Syd, registering him as Sydney John Chaplin. 

The couple separated when Charlie was still a child. His father abandoned the family, leaving the brothers with their mother after finding out that his wife was having an affair with another music-hall singer, Leo Dryden. Chaplin’s second half-brother, Wheeler Dryden, was born from this relationship, in1892. He went to live with his father in India and only found out about his kinship with Chaplin when the great comedian became famous.

Wheeler only joined his brothers and mother in the 20’s. In 1928, he directed Sydney in the film A Little Bit of Fluff, set in England.
 

A serious condition in the larynx ended their mother’s career as a singer and her first crisis was when she was performing "La Cantina" at the Aldershot theatre, mainly frequented by rioters and soldiers, one of the worst places to perform. Lily was badly injured by the objects the mercilessly audience threw at her and she was booed off the stage. Backstage, she cried and argued with her manager. In the meantime, Chaplin went on stage alone and started singing a very well known tune at that time (Jack Jones). 

At the early age of five, he attracted an avalanche of coins that the very same difficult and ruthless audience hurled at the talented artist, born before their very eyes.

  Hannah was unemployed and had to live with her two children in a shelter in Lambeth, The Lambeth Workhouse. She started working as a nurse and seamstress at home (using a rented machine).

They later went to live in the Hanwell School for orphans and the homeless, a period in which Hannah presented the first symptoms of mental illness (medicated through the Municipal Health Care Service).

1896 - Hannah Chaplin is sent to the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum after a mental breakdown, where her children slept in a separate room.

At this time, Sydney had gotten a job as a telegraph messenger and Chaplin went through various occupations: delivery boy at a grocery shop and a stationary shop, receptionist at a doctor’s office, messenger boy, glass blower (this job only lasted a day because he blew so hard, he fainted), typesetter and cloth seller.

After some time, he lived alone in orphanages as his half-brother joined the navy and Hannah was still coming in and out of asylums

In these surroundings of poverty and suffering, Chaplin found all the elements, all his strength and talent that would be later used to create film scripts in which he starred and directed.

 On his eighth birthday, with the help of his father, Charlie was hired by a dance company called Eight Lancashire Lads. 

In 1901, soon after the death of his father due to alcoholism, he signed his first steady contract as an actor, playing the role of a messenger in a version of Sherlock Holmes. With this job, his financial situation changed.

He was employed by the Casey Circus, where he developed his comical abilities. In the first presentation, he drew laughter from a large audience for the first time for the brave way he would collect the coins thrown at the arena.

As a teenager, Chaplin got into the company of the acrobat, Fred Karno. They were introduced by Sydney that worked in the company at the time. Syd had always believed in his brother’s talent. Karno was successful staging mime shows. This was undoubtedly Chapin’s strong point and he quickly surpassed the performer Harry Weldon with whom he shared the number.

In 1909, he had his first season in Paris.

On a tour in northern England, Chaplin went to Toronto and New York and from there, went on to the east. Broadway did not assimilate English humour but Charlie’s talent attracted the attention of some newspapers and one spectator that, at that time, worked for the cinema, Mack Sennett, who would later become his new boss.

While in Philadelphia, in 1913, Chaplin received a telegram requesting he go to an office in the centre of Broadway, the headquarters of the Keystone Comedy Film Company. He was offered a salary of 150 dollars to make three films a week.

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 His first film debut, in February 1914, was about the adventures of a comical character in the editorial office of a newspaper. In his second film, Kids Auto Races (1914), he created a character that would soon be identified by the public. Sennett asked him to dress in a funny way. “I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. Everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I didn’t know if I should look old or young but when I remembered that Sennet had thought I was a lot older, I put a moustache on that would add some years without hiding my facial expression.” That is how the famous Charlie was born.

With Chaplin, Charles created a unique style, characterized by bereavement and the predominance of the image, supported by mime and bodily expression. Chaplin criticized the false bourgeois dignity, identifying himself with the poor.

           The first classics

 The Floorwalker (1916), Easy Street (1917), The Cure (1917) and The Immigrant (1917). The Bond (1918), Shoulder Arms (1918), A Dog’s Life (1918), The Idle Class(1921), The Pilgrim (1923) and The Kid (1921).

               END OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS

                          :

  The debut of the first film with sound, The Jazz Singer, caused great commotion. Charlie had already started filming City Lights (1928) when he realized that silent films were coming to an end. He, nevertheless, did not allow Chaplin to speak.

     After the New York stock market crash, the New Deal and with the effervescence of the European fascist movements, Chaplin did not disguise his sympathy for socialism, reflecting his disquiet in both of the only films he made in the 30’s.

   In Modern Times (1936), Chaplin portrays a satire about the alienation of workers in the mass production process. The star role is still Chaplin’s, who does not utter a single word in the entire film.

In The Great Dictator (1940), the great British filmmaker was cast as fascist dictator Adenoid Hynkel, under the character of Chaplin, clearly a caricature of Adolf Hitler. In this film, Chaplin speaks for the first time, making his debut with the controversial speech on war.  Germany, the occupied countries and the neutral countries had to wait for another political moment to show the film. Not all North Americans identified with the pacifist speech at the end of the film. Franklin D. Roosevelt himself received Chaplin in the White House after having requested a private viewing of the Great Dictator and his only comment was quite concise, “It is evident Charlie, that your film is giving us many headaches”.  

 For having directed and played the main role in the film, Chaplin was marked by the anti-communist movements that emerged after the Second World War. To show an anti-Nazi film and express humanitarian arguments in favour of an allied nation was sufficient to be considered a threat to the United States that, paradoxically, was at war with Germany and on the same side as the Soviet Union.

 At this time, Chaplin had already met his forth wife, Era Oona O’Neil, daughter of the famous playwright Eugene O’Neil. Charlie and Era married in 1943, in a small town on the coast of California.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947) is based on a biography of Landru, a sadistic murderer that seduced and then killed women.

In this film, Chaplin was conclusively excluded. Monsieur Verdoux was not only censured by the Motion Pictures Association but also by an ample sector of the press and some right-wing organizations. The film was a complete flop. The House  Un-American Activities Commitee included Chaplin in the list of  “hostile witnesses”. As Chaplin was not subpoenaed immediately, he sent a written declaration in which he stated, ““For your convenience I will tell you what I think you want to know. I am not a communist, neither have I ever joined any political party or organization in my life. I am what you call a ‘peacemonger.’ I hope this will not offend you.” --  Charles Spencer Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 449. Though the subpoena was subsequently dropped, Chaplin was denied entry to the United States in 1952. 

Regardless of his totally hostile environment, Chaplin filmed Limelight (1952), in the United States, a melodrama about a music-hall performer who dedicates his last years encouraging a young ballerina in her career. In this film, Chaplin worked with Buster Keaton, another great comedy actor of that period.

In September 1952, Chaplin received agents of the Department of Immigration. He was suspected of being a communist, of being unpatriotic, impeding his nationalization, and of committing adultery. Those were the last days of Chaplin in the United States. With the excuse of needing some holidays, he went to New York for the press release of his film, Limelight and, from there, embarked for London on the Queen Elizabeth with his wife and their four children. After two days at sea, Chaplin received a telegram informing him of the opening of a new investigation, requested by the State Inspector General, in which the old accusations reappeared, concerning his political activities and private life. This marked his final rupture with a country that had been his home for the last forty years.

The premier of Limelight (1952) in London, Paris and Rome allowed Chaplin to travel extensively through Europe. He finally settled near the Swiss town of Vevey. Oona returned to the U.S. to clear up some financial matters and get the negatives of Chaplin’s films. Back in Europe, in the American Consulate in Lausanne, she renounced her citizenship and returned her visa, alleging that, “she was too old to tolerate such nonsense.”

 A King in New Yrok (1956) was filmed in London and was Chaplin’s revenge for all the humiliation he had endured in the United States.

 In 1965, on Chaplin’s birthday, Sydney died. He had always helped the comedian, working as an actor, businessman and, most of all, had been a wonderful brother.

In 1971, the Hollywood Academy tried to restore the reputation of the United States, honouring Chaplin with a special Oscar, “for the priceless contribution to the art of the century: cinema”. A year later, he received another Oscar with a special twist, for best soundtrack for the film, Limelight. As the film had not opened in Los Angeles, it could be candidate for the Oscar twenty years later. On this occasion, Chaplin decided to return to America and stepped on the stage for the last time, receiving a lengthy applause.

      Three years later, the Queen of England honoured Chaplin with a knighthood of the British Empire. In 1977, during the early hours of the 25th of December, at eighty-eight, the lights from those aged eyes finally shut down.

A genius had gone but the joy and emotions of his films that illuminate the faces of thousands of fans, the generations of times past and to come, will never be extinguished.