Fade to Black Magazine Presents:

Who Was Charlie Chaplin and 
Why Did the FBI Investigate Him?
Chaplin Biography - Part I

Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin (1889-1977) grew up in poverty in London, England, became a successful pantomimist in the English music halls in his early 20s, and joined Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios in 1913. He soon began both starring in and directing two-reel comedies featuring his comic alter ego, the Tramp. That persona and the films became tremendously popular in the middle and later 1910s, and Chaplin negotiated that popularity into increasingly large salaries. By 1919, he had not only built his own movie studio but also co-founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith. Building his own studio gave Chaplin an unusually high degree of creative independence in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1940s, at a time when the studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner usually held the bulk of power.   

All of Chaplin's films between A Woman of Paris (1923) and Limelight (1952) were distributed through United Artists after Chaplin independently produced them. Besides those two feature films, Chaplin also made The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), and Monsieur Verdoux (1947) during this period.

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