We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
cc 2
"Carlitos," etc. Anyone who could make such a lasting and universal impression is unquestionably deserving of a definitive study of his life and work.
More has been written on Chaplin than on any other film figure. Our foremost writers and intellectuals have vied in tributes to his art. Of those privileged to know him personally, numbers have given their impressions of his multifaceted personality. However, no one book — at least in English — has yet attempted a rounded study of both his career and his personal life.
It is obvious that a man's life affects and is affected by his work. In Chaplin particularly, his background, kaleidoscopic life, and the many people who played a part in it, have all left their mark on his screen creations.
Chaplin is an extremely complex personality. He is enigmatic about his birth, family background, childhood, and early youth. He let it be believed for many years, for reasons known only to himself, that he was born in Fontainebleau, France, when it has been established that London was his birthplace. The legends that grew around him may have been encouraged to grow. Individualistic, limited in formal education, making incredible sums of money in his middle twenties, spoiled by adulation, arrogant and selfish at times, anarchistic and unbound by love for any one country, a nonconformist in life as in his art, sometimes ruthless toward women — he was an inevitable target of criticism. For all his inexhaustible creative fecundity, his unique contribution to the world's gaiety, and his personal charm (the screen "Charlie" is in many ways a projection of his real self), we must face certain inexplicable aspects of his private life objectively. We must avoid whitewash, the better to understand him.
From his screen start in 1914, he was a richly rewarded hit comedian, and, from the start, he was also something more. His unique qualities were recognized at once.