A new Charlie Chaplin documentary paints a “more rounded portrait” of the silent film star’s “complicated” life – including fractious relationships with his teenage wives.
Granted access to unseen archive material from the Chaplin estate, filmmakers Peter Middleton and James Spinney attempt to get to know the man behind the toothbrush moustache in The Real Charlie Chaplin.
“We were struck when we began making the film,” Middleton tells Sky News. “So many people have this image of the Little Tramp, the guy with the moustache, the cane and the bowler hat, and actually that sort of flattens in some ways our understanding of him.
Chapin pictured with Lita Grey, his second wife, in 1924. Pic: AP
“He was an extraordinary, complicated character and had an extraordinary canvas of a life. So it was very much our intention to try and flesh that out and to try and present a more rounded portrait of the man.”
Chaplin’s rise to an unparalleled level of fame in the early 1900s is the ultimate rags to riches story, his…
