Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin
Peter Ackroyd

Not all biographies are of much help in understanding or interpreting an artist’s work, but in the case of Charlie Chaplin some knowledge of where he was coming from is useful. The man’s creative output was a direct consequence and reflection of his unhappy childhood. Raised in poverty, with an alcoholic (soon deceased) father and a mad mother, he quickly had to shift for himself by going on stage. And so in later life he would be obsessed with money and mistrustful of others, becoming a distant father and a self-directed control freak. He was also hard on women (who he both sentimentally idealized and lusted after). As Peter Ackroyd points out, there was much of Dickens here, and a little of Hitler as well. An auteur — and Chaplin was as total an auteur as one could imagine — is a dictator. Ackroyd briskly covers the bases in this short bio, though he avoids any penetrating critical judgments. In preferring to be suggestive, however, he suggests enough.