This Week In Cigar History: April 14-20

Endearingly kicking up his heels into hearts across the world, the cigar chomping, refined Tramp, Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr., was born this week on April 16, 1889.

Impoverished at an early age, Charlie Chaplin was forced to leave school and began to dance and sing on stages across England with his older brother Sydney. Naturally talented, Chaplin soon toured America with a vaudeville act, the Fred Karno Troupe, (1910-1912) which included another cigar-chomping comic, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, later known as Stan Laurel.

During the troupe’s stateside performances, Chaplin’s gift for pantomime convinced producer Mack Sennet of Hollywood’s Keystone Film Company to offer the young Englishman several comedic roles. It was in these early silent movies that Chaplin developed the legendary Tramp character who is always scouring the ground for cigar butts. As he notes in his autobiography:

“I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young ... [but] I added a small moustache, which I reasoned would add age without hiding my expression.”

Chaplin’s immense talent and need for artistic control came to full fruition with his co-founding of the United Artists film distribution company in1919) with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. Several classic Chaplin films are from this era, including The Gold Rush and City Lights (1931) where one gag has the comic attempting to light a sausage, thinking it’s a cigar. And though late to embrace the talkies, Chaplin’s first sound film, the political satire of Hitler, The Great Dictator (1940) was arguably his finest.

news@doubledownmedia.com

4/14/08

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