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Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London, England.
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Charlie started a career as a comedian in vaudeville as a featured player with the Fred Karno Repertoire Company
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When the Fred Karno troupe returned to the United States in the fall of 1912 for a repeat tour, Chaplin was offered a motion picture contract
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Charlie was even more in demand and signed with the Mutual Film Corporation for a much larger sum to make 12 two-reel comedies.
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When his contract with Mutual expired, Chaplin decided to become an independent producer in a desire for more freedom and greater leisure in making his movies. To that end, he busied himself with the construction of his own studios.
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His first film under this new deal was "A Dog’s Life"
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Chaplin joined with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith to found the United Artists Corporation
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"The Circus" won Charles Chaplin his first Academy Award – it was still not yet called the ‘Oscar’ – he was given it at the first presentations ceremony, in 1929.
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Chaplin was acutely preoccupied with the social and economic problems of this new age.
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In the film Chaplin plays a dual role –a Jewish barber who lost his memory in a plane accident in the first war, and Hynkel, the dictator leader of Ptomania
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The idea was originally suggested by Orson Welles, as a project for a dramatised documentary on the career of the legendary French murder Henri Désiré Landru – who was executed in 1922, having murdered at least ten women, two dogs and one boy.
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Limelight's story of a once famous music hall artist whom nobody finds amusing any longer may well have been similarly autobiographical as a sort of nightmare scenario
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In 1966 he produced his last picture, “A Countess from Hong Kong” for Universal Pictures, his only film in colour, starring Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando.
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He died on Christmas day 1977, survived by eight children from his last marriage with Oona O’Neill, and one son from his short marriage to Lita Grey.