A workhouse childhood, a mother carried off to an asylum — Chaplin poured that hunger into the Tramp, the bowler-hatted figure who became the most recognized face on earth without words. Writer, director, composer, and star of his own films, he fused slapstick with social feeling in The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times, then spoke for the first time to mock Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). Marriages to teenagers, a paternity scandal, and Cold War suspicion got him barred from the United States in 1952. The honorary Oscar of 1972 was widely read as an apology.
He was the most famous face on earth, and it belonged to a man playing a penniless tramp. By 1920 the figure with the bowler hat, the cane, the splayed shoes, and the toothbrush moustache was recognized in places that had never seen an American film star, on continents that did not share a language, because the language was the body. Charlie Chaplin had grown up in real London poverty, a workhouse child whose mother was carried off to an asylum, and he poured that hunger into a little man who kept his dignity while the world kicked him. People laughed until they ached, and then, without warning, ached. He made comedy carry weight no one thought it could carry, used it to mock the machine age and to mock Hitler, and then watched his adopted country drive him out as a subversive. The slum child became the closest thing the twentieth century had to a universal face.