Chaplin

This trip through Chaplin's fifty-four-year career begins with his dirt-poor London boyhood as the son of failed vaudevillian mother Hannah who has begun a slow descent into insanity. It tracks his early London vaudeville career; his arrival in the US in 1913 and phenomenal success in the early days of the American film industry; his formation, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith of the United Artists studio; his sometimes turbulent working relationship with his half-brother/manager Sydney; his scandalous liaisons with, and series of marriages to, young women; his loss of an unjust paternity suit brought against him by Joan Barry; the animosity borne him by J. Edgar Hoover, resulting in his tainting as a 'Communist' and forced exile from the US; his happy, thirty-five-year marriage to fourth wife Oona O'Neil; and his triumphant return to the US in 1972 to receive an honorary Oscar for his life's work. Directed by Lord Richard Attenborough and starring Robert Downey, Jr. and an extraordinary cast, Chaplin is a loving, grand-scale portrait of the Little Tramp’s amazing life and times.