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He played his violin and his cello he read Schopenhauer he had sex with bad girls and he planned ever more fantastical comedy conceptions.

On stage, at any rate: Chaplin seems to have been no fun at all in life – morose, private, obsessed. " Monsieur Chaplin," he said, " vous êtes instinctivement un musicien et un danseur." And funny, he might have added deeply, uproariously, side-huggingly funny. The character of the drunk, Chaplin said, possessed him playing it, he experienced a kind of out-of-body sensation: "It was almost a psychic sort of thing." When Karno took the troupe to Paris, Debussy invited Chaplin to his box. By the age of 20 he was a star, billed as Chaplin the Inebriate – an act studied at close quarters from his stepfather. But not without having put in some serious slog on the way.Īfter gruelling hard work on the road and a spell as a boy actor, he signed up with the king of comedy, a tough taskmaster called Fred Karno, under whose unrelenting tutelage in the art of physical comedy his genius as a performer first fully emerged. A millionaire tramp, of course, is exactly what he would end up as. His education was skimpy and fitful it ended at the age of nine, when, having taught himself clog-dancing, he first took to the stage as one of the Eight Lancashire Lads, and nearly became part of a double act called Bristol and Chaplin, the Millionaire Tramps. Before long, the man she had been married to at the time of Charlie's birth, and whose name he bore and made immortal, dumped her, as did several subsequent paramours when she was incapable of looking after Charlie and his brother, they stayed with relatives or lodged in the workhouse. He had been born into south London poverty, the offspring of an unknown father and a mother whose brief career as a singer and dancer came to an end when Charlie was a boy from then on, until her death in an asylum in Los Angeles, her sanity came and went. "I n this year, 1915," begins a chapter halfway through Peter Ackroyd's concise, compelling new biography, "Chaplin became the most famous man in the world." This fact is so extraordinary – so improbable, in the light of his origins – that it is allowed to stand alone, a paragraph in itself.