For half a century, he was the most successful and instantly recognisable entertainer the world had ever seen
It's 100 years this week since Charlie Chaplin made his film debut. And he's still going. This week Chaplin's only work of prose fiction, Footlights, on which his great late film Limelight was based, is published for the first time in an edition put together by the film historian David Robinson. It is sometimes fashionable to dismiss Chaplin for his sentimentality and for a style of humour that is deemed not to connect with modern audiences. Be that as it may, for half a century he was not just the most successful and instantly recognisable entertainer the world had ever seen, but the first movie superstar with a social and political conscience. Footlights, like Limelight, is a bittersweet piece of self-awareness by someone who understood that, partly due to J Edgar Hoover's efforts, he was losing his public. But as his autobiography showed, Chaplin could write as well as act. Not bad for a lad who spent a mere six months in a south London school.
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