Sir Charles Spencer " Charlie " Chaplin, KBE ( 16 April 188925 December 1977 ) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era.

Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era.

Chaplin was identified with left-wing politics during the McCarthy era and he was ultimately forced to resettle in Europe from 1952.

In 2008, Martin Sieff, in a review of the book Chaplin: A Life, wrote: " Chaplin was not just ' big ', he was gigantic.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889 to Hannah Chaplin ( née Hill, 1865 – 1928 ) and Charles Chaplin Sr. ( 1863 – 1901 ).

There is no official record of his birth, although Chaplin believed he was born at East Street, Walworth, in South London.

Because of this poverty, Chaplin was sent to a workhouse at seven years old.

In September 1898, Hannah Chaplin was committed to Cane Hill mental asylum — she had developed a psychosis seemingly brought on by malnutrition and an infection of syphilis.

" For the two months she was there, Chaplin and his brother were sent to live with their father, whom the young boy scarcely knew.

Charles Chaplin Sr. was by then a severe alcoholic, and life with the man was bad enough to provoke a visit from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

" There was nothing we could do but accept poor mother's fate ", Chaplin later wrote, and she remained in care until her death in 1928.

Hannah had been booed off stage, and the manager chose Chaplin, who was standing in the wings, to go on as her replacement.

It was an isolated performance, but at nine years old Chaplin became interested in the theatre.

Chaplin worked hard and the act was popular with audiences, but dancing did not satisfy the child and he dreamt of forming a comedy act.

The manager sensed potential in Chaplin and he was soon on the stage.

" It was like tidings from heaven ", Chaplin recalled.

Chaplin quickly began work in another role, touring with his brother — who was also pursuing an acting career — in a comedy sketch called Repairs.

It was popular with audiences and Chaplin became the star of the show.

Such was my state of mind that I did not question the possibility of this ; ;

The slight flutter that had disturbed the motion of her heart when she entered the forest was gone now, and even the dim groves of trees through which she occasionally passed did not reawaken her fear.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

There was something about the contour of her face, her smile that was like New Orleans sunshine, the way she held her head, the way she walked -- there was scarcely anything she did which did not fascinate me.

True, she was my Aunt, married to an Uncle related to me only by marriage, but why she had married a man twice her age, and more, perhaps, I did not know or much care.

Even as she was telling me about it I became aware of a give-away flush that suffused her neck and moved upwards to her cheeks, and subconsciously I realized that when she entered the store she did not switch on the lights.

If it were not that I knew who it was I could have mistaken it for my Aunt so well did her clothes fit him.

Yet he did drop his badinage with the ordinary country girl as much in deference to the Grafin as acknowledgement that here, indeed, was something special.

But `` after the war '' was a luxury of a phrase he did not permit himself.

He went to Key West every fall and winter and was the only man in town who did not know that his title of `` Commodore '' was never used without irony.

Now it did not occur to him even to wonder whether it was wise for Robinson to dive again: Rob was his boy, the kid he had rescued from the streets, the object of his pride.

Waddell was not an eminently moral person, but he did not like what he had just heard.

To Tilghman the incident was just one of a long list of hair-raising, smash-'em-down adventures on the side of the law which started in 1872 when he was only eighteen years old, and did not end till fifty years later when he was shot dead after warning a drunk to be quiet.

Sometimes he did this three or four times a day, for this Woman was almost always with him.

That night he dreamed a dream violent with passion, in which he and the Woman, now the teacher, did everything except engage in the act ( and this probably only because he had never engaged in the act in reality ), and when he awoke the next morning his heart was afire.

She was nude to the waist and her tumbled abundance of black hair did not conceal the knife slashes on her back.

There was not enough room to make the usual vertical bomb run.

He was about to make a gas check on his flight when Todman's voice broke in: `` Sweeneys!!

He was most eager to make the dive ; ;

Jack walked off alone out the road in the searing midday sun, past Robert Allen's three-room, tarpapered house, toward the field where the other boys were playing ball, thinking of what he would do in order to make Miss Langford have him stay in after school -- because this was the day he had decided when he thought he saw the look in her eyes.

It was to provide a safe and spacious crossing for these caravans, and also to make a pleasance for the city, that Shah Abbas 2, in about 1657 built, of sun-baked brick, tile, and stone, the present bridge.

But I suspect that the old Roman was referring to change made under military occupation -- the sort of change which Tacitus was talking about when he said, `` They make a desert, and call it peace '' ( `` Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant ''.

Was it supposed, perchance, that A & M ( vocational training, that is ) was quite sufficient for the immigrant class which flooded that part of the New England world in the post-Civil War period, the immigrants having been brought in from Southern Europe, to work in the mills, to make up for the labor shortage caused by migration to the West??

When the possibility that he had not given reconsideration to so weighty a decision seemed to disconcert his questioners, Mr. Eisenhower was known to make his characteristic statement to the press that he was not going to talk about the matter any more.

For Rachel, conceded to be the prettiest of the Szold girls -- and she did make a pretty picture sitting in the grape-arbor strumming her guitar and singing in her silvery tones -- there was no particular March counterpart ; ;

To you, for instance, the word innocence, in this connotation, probably retained its Biblical, or should I say technical sense, and therefore I suppose I must make myself quite clear by saying that I lost -- or rather handed over -- what you would have considered to be my innocence two weeks before I was legally entitled, and in fact by oath required, to hand it over along with what other goods and bads I had.

Bang-Jensen said you told correspondents that you had checked in advance to make sure the term ' aberrant conduct ' was not libelous.

It was a good report, he did all he could to make it a good report.

For a freshman Congressman to read political Lessons to graybeard Democrats was poor policy for one who needed to make friends.

A special guard was posted at my end of the bridge to make sure I didn't cross, the ludicrousness of the situation being revealed fully in that everyone else -- men, women, and children, dogs, cats, horses, cars, trucks, baby carriages -- could cross Kehl bridge into Kehl without surveillance.

I was delighted to make that personal contact in such trying and unusual circumstances.

While the final combat of the campaign was being worked out at Jonesborough, Thomas, on Sherman's instructions, ordered Slocum, now commanding the Twentieth Corps, to make an effort to occupy Atlanta if he could do so without exposing his bridgehead to a counterattack.

At headquarters -- sufficiently far from the firing line to make you forget occasionally that you were in a war -- Lewis found that the Commander in Chief's only desk was his knees ( and his only comb, his fingers ).

After complimenting Morgan and the riflemen and saying he was praising them to Congress, too, the ardent Frenchman added he felt that Congress should make some financial restitution to the widow and family of Morris, but that he knew Morgan realized how long such action usually required, if it was done at all.

Nogaret is hardly an impartial witness, and even he did not make his charges against Boniface until the latter was dead, but there is some truth in what he said and more in what he did not say.

He concluded that selective service would not only prevent the disorganization of essential war industries but would avoid the undesirable moral effects of the British reliance on enlistment only -- `` where the feeling of the people was whipped into a frenzy by girls pinning white feathers on reluctant young men, orators preaching hate of the Germans, and newspapers exaggerating enemy outrages to make men enlist out of motives of revenge and retaliation ''.

Lady Greville, daughter of the late Lord Chancellor Bromley and niece of Sir John Fortescue, was offered twenty pounds by the townsmen to make peace ; ;

Of Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe the philosopher Whitehead said the Earth's first visitors to Mars should be persons likely to make a good impression, and when he was asked, `` Whom would you send ''??