Once the script was complete, Chaplin and his producer Jerry Epstein saw the urgency, given Chaplin’s age, of getting the film into active production as soon as possible.

Chaplin had the idea for THE FREAK in 1968-9 when he was close to 80, and was inspired to produce the script in a much shorter time and with more confidence than any preceding screenplay. This book is not just the first-ever publication of an unknown Chaplin film script, but the comprehensive presentation of an unfinished film – one of Charles Chaplin’s most remarkable works, and his last. La storia di un film incompiuto - David Robinson, Cecilia Cenciarelli, Charlie Chaplin But this retrospect also recalled the painful insecurity of an uneducated, uncultured boy launched into the world of success.ĭavid Robinson, Chaplin’s most eminent biographer, traces the long yet logical. For a setting, he looked back to London and the music halls of his first professional years, an enchanted period in which he had broken out of the deprivations of his childhood to discover, progressively, his unique gifts as entertainer and communicator.

Chaplin’s vivid, idiosyncratic style, unadulterated by editors, moves freely from the baldly colloquial to moments of rich imagery and Dickensian description. After remaining virtually unknown for more than 60 years after its completion, Footlights is now published by Cineteca di Bologna in this volume for the very first time. Long before becoming one of the masterpieces of Charlie Chaplin’s artistic maturity, and even before existing as a screenplay, Limelight was conceived by its author as a 34,000-word novella. Buy it nowĬharlie Chaplin: Footlights with The World of Limelight - Charlie Chaplin & D. Now fully updated with added pictures and an extended filmography, it includes revelatory new material on Chaplin’s marriages, his affair with movie star Louise Brooks, his persecution by the FBI during anti-communist witch hunts - exposing their role in the ’white slavery’ case against him - and the significance of Richard Attenborough’s film Chaplin. This engrossing and definitive work, the only biography written with full access to Chaplin’s archives, tells the whole story of a brilliant, complex man.

His life was marked by extraordinary contrasts: the child of London slums who became a multimillionaire the on-screen clown who was a driven perfectionist behind the cameras the adulated star who publicly fell from grace after personal and political scandal. The greatest icon in the history of cinema, Charlie Chaplin lived one of the most dramatic rags to riches stories ever told.

Charlie chaplin autobiography book