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Chaplin, The Movie Makers by Denis Gifford PDF
Cinema has two symbols, two little figures that are recognized around the world wherever films are known and shown. One is ten inches tall, golden, and is the highest honour Hollywood has to bestow. They call him Oscar. The other is five-foot-six inches tall, wears a bowler hat and a little moustache, carries a cane, has flat feet, and is the funniest man who ever lived. He answers to the name of Charlie. Charlie and Oscar met face to face for the first time on the night of 11 April 1972. It was a night to remember for both of them. Oscar was 44 years old, Charlie 82.
The President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts stepped to the microphone and announced that this year, a special presentation of an Honorary Oscar was about to be made. It would go to an actor, writer, director, producer and composer, and out came one man, silver-haired, small, shaking, red-faced, wet-eyed, waving. Charles Chaplin...Charlie Chaplin...Charlie.
Charles Spencer Chaplin had come a long way to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles that night. Not just from his home in Switzerland, but from the more distant corners of Victorian London. He had come from the Cockney gutters of the Elephant & Castle, the Orphanages of Hanwell, the grim Workhouses of Lambeth. He had come from the music halls of the East End, and the Folies of Paris, from the vaudevilles of the East Side, and the Burlesques of the Mid-West. He had come from the suburban studios of primitive Hollywood, he had come through marriages and divorces, insults and accusations, law-suits and scandals, and a twenty year exile. And on the way he had made more people laugh than any other man in history.
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