Charlie Chaplin

Charles Chaplin was the biggest film star of the silent film era. Indeed, he was the most famous person in the world. Audiences everywhere idolized his Tramp character in such classics as "The Gold Rush" (1925). In this podcast episode, HCC film professors Marie Westhaver and Mike Giuliano discuss Chaplin's meteoric rise from an impoverished upbringing in London through a vaudeville-style apprenticeship and on to making slapstick short films in Hollywood in the 1910s. Chaplin achieved fame and fortune so quickly that this director/actor quite literally could call his own shots at the independent studio he built for himself in Hollywood. Even though his most acclaimed films were made so many decades ago, the image of Chaplin's Tramp is still familiar to us today.