My Autobiography Charles Chaplin

Description

He was born in 1889, in London–the son of struggling variety artists–his father, a vaudevillian who died young; his mother, a spirited music-hall soubrette who lost her voice and, eventually, her reason. His childhood was pure Dickens–in and out of the workhouse, then a hand-to-mouth existence as a juvenile actor.

At 21, member of a traveling music-hall company, he came to America. And the infant movie industry stumbled upon the greatest star it was ever to find.

Everything in his autobiography makes fascinating reading: his boyhood; the London theatre of Dion Boucicault and William Gillette; the early free-wheeling days of the movies; how he evolved his style, his plots; how he chose his leading ladies; his sudden, dazzling success; his encounters with great stars and world figures from Mary Pickford to Gandhi to Bernard Shaw to Gertrude Stein to Anna Pavlova to FDR; his emotional involvements and his four marriages. He sets it all down and in a manner intensely personal.

The great Hollywood days are recreated as never before. He speaks with candor of the stormy postwar years–the humiliations of the paternity suit brought against him on the eve of his marriage to Oona O’Neill, and the political accusations that made him decide to leave the United States.

And in the finale he writes with evocative warmth of the happy ending–his serene, idyllic life in Switzerland with Oona and their eight children.

Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography–the outspoken memoir of a great artist–is sure to be one of the most wanted, enjoyed and widely discussed books of the decade.