Chaplin's Early Years

Most, if not all, comic actors have donned skirts in the name of a laugh at some point in their career. So it's not surprising to find a young Charlie Chaplin taking to lipstick and a wig from time to time. In The Masquerader, Chaplin uses his "feminine wiles" to regain entry into Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, from which he had (in the film) been fired a short time earlier.




Chaplin spies on fellow Keystoner Roscoe Arbuckle in The Masquerader



1912 Portland, Oregon vaudeville ad

In real life, Keystone Studios had lured Chaplin from Fred Karno's London Company, a British traveling vaudeville show where he had gained notoriety for his portrayal of a drunken audience member who interferes with the stage show in a sketch called "A Night at an English Music Hall." (Chaplin would later use this idea for a 1915 short film for Essanay Company, A Night at the Show.)

Publicity photo of "A Night in an English Music Hall"


















Charlie Chaplin in 1914

It was for his second short film at Keystone, Mabel's Strange Predicament, that Charlie Chaplin hit upon the character for which he would become renowned. "I had no idea what makeup to put on," he recalled in his autobiography. "However, on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane, and a derby hat....remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which, I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born."

A Tramp is born: Mabel's Strange Predicament

(Mabel Normand, Charlie Chaplin, Marie Dressler and
officer Wallace MacDonald, in Tillie's Punctured Romance

Charlie Chaplin would go on to make at least 33 more short films (or "two-reelers," as they were known) during his year at Keystone, before accepting a higher-paying contract from Essanay Company. During that year, he played a variety of characters, from a boxing referee (The Knockout) to a baker (Dough and Dynamite), and participated in cinematic history by portraying a villainous con artist in the first full-length comedy ever filmed, Tillie's Punctured Romance.

Officer Charlie reports for duty in A Thief Catcher

In 2010, a long-lost and forgotten two-reeler surfaced at a Michigan antique sale, at last providing definitive proof of something Chaplin had many times claimed: that during his tenure with Mack Sennett, he also played a Keystone Kop.


Two DVD sets in the library collection -- Chaplin's Essanay Comedies and The Chaplin Mutuals -- provide a look at Chaplin's growth from vaudevillian to celebrated master of the comedic screen.

(A third, Chaplin at Keystone, soon to arrive, features those first and earliest days spent with Mack Sennett at Keystone Studios.)

These and other silent classics are now available at the Conyers-Rockdale Library. Check one out today, and see history in the making.

The Little Tramp annoys a "documentary film crew" in Kid Auto Races at Venice