Charlie Chaplin, monster

No actual birth certificate for Charles Spencer Chaplin has ever been found. The actor himself drew a blank when he went on a rummage in Somerset House. The latest research suggests that he was born ‘in a gypsy caravan in Smethwick, near Birmingham’. But surely the truth has been staring people in the face ever since the Little Tramp first popped on the screen: Chaplin is the lost twin of Adolf Hitler.

Peter Ackroyd almost suggests as much. Both men first drew breath in April 1889. They had drunken fathers and nervous mothers. There were patterns of madness and illegitimacy in the family tree. They were short and sported an identical moustache. They had marked histrionic skills, each man ‘appealing to millions of people with an almost mesmeric magic’. They were despotic towards underlings — and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator is less political satire than back-handed homage. Hitler watched it at a private screening — twice.

By 1915, says Ackroyd, Chaplin was ‘the most famous man in the world’. Lenin said that ‘Chaplin is the only man in the world I want to meet.’ He stayed with Churchill at Chartwell. At Nancy Astor’s house he met Shaw and Keynes. Barrie and H.G. Wells were fans. Debussy told him, ‘You are instinctively a musician and dancer.’ Almost as a symbol of the Victorian age yielding to modern times, Chaplin had been invited to attend Henry Irving’s funeral at Westminster Abbey — and he accepted acclaim and precedence as his due. ‘I am known in parts of the world by people who have never heard of Jesus Christ,’ he boasted. His one unfulfilled ambition was to star in a biopic about Napoleon.

Chaplin’s hubris had no limits. Offered prizes and awards, he was ungracious: ‘I don’t think you are qualified to judge my work,’ he once said, returning a trophy.