Charlie chaplin

The commission Thirty-four years ago, in the summer of 1990, I had a call from my Hollywood agent, Geoffrey Sanford. Lord Richard Attenborough, the film director, would like to meet me to discuss a project. I said “Yes, please,” instantly. The timing was good — I had delivered my fifth novel Brazzaville Beach to my publishers and was awaiting its autumn publication. I met Dickie, as everyone called him, with his co-producer and right-hand woman, Diana Carter, in Blake’s Hotel in west London. The subject of the meeting was a proposed film of the life of Charlie Chaplin, a passion project of Dickie’s. But there was a complication. A script had already been written by Dickie’s old friend, the actor-director-producer Bryan Forbes.

When Shakespeare wrote that “some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them,” the Bard could not have been thinking of Buster Keaton, who was born nearly three centuries after his death. Yet the idea expressed in that famous line from Twelfth Night — that some men guide their fate while others are controlled by it — carries a curious resonance for fans of the legendary silent performer known for his notably impassive, even indifferent comic persona in masterpieces including The Navigator (1924) and The General (1926). If ever there was a man on whom life, if not greatness, was thrust, it was the one they called the “Great Stone Face.

‘I learnt there was Charlie and there was Chaplin,’ Jackie Coogan, the actor’s young foil in 1921’s groundbreaking The Kid once remarked. ‘The first was the biggest movie star on the planet, the second an insecure boy from the slums of London.’ Luckily for us, both sides of the Chaplin persona meshed perfectly in The Kid, with its generous helpings of the comic and the sentimental. It may be the Little Tramp’s most perfect and most personal film. Like almost everything that’s any good in art, The Kid emerged out of turmoil. In October 1918, the 29-year-old Chaplin had married the first of his child brides, 16-year-old Mildred Harris, after she told him she was pregnant.