The tramp who ruled Hollywood: How Charlie Chaplin became the world's biggest star (despite falling out with Hitler, Brando, the FBI... and more than one teenage bride)

The Charlie Chaplin Archives show how Charlie Chaplin developed gags – from eating his own boots in The Gold Rush (pictured above) to being dragged over giant cogs in Modern Times

Assigned to play a drunk for a film in 1914, Chaplin spotted Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle’s enormous trousers and began to create a look. ‘I wanted everything a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large,’ Chaplin said. ‘By the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born [pictured above in an extremely rare colour shot]. ‘My costume helps me to express my conception of the average man. The derby hat is a striving for dignity. The moustache is vanity. The stick is a gesture towards gallantry. He is chasing folly, and he knows it. He knows it so well that he can laugh at himself’

In 1918, when he was 29, Chaplin began a relationship with Mildred Harris, a 17-year-old actress. Harris thought she was pregnant and Chaplin married her. Her pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm, and when the couple did have a child it was born deformed and died the following day. ‘The death of our firstborn was, I think, also the death of our marriage,’ Harris said. Within two years Harris divorced Chaplin on the grounds of extreme mental cruelty and bodily injury. Of her ex-husband, Harris said: ‘Mr Chaplin is a genius, and a genius should never marry’

Throughout his career Chaplin’s collaborators would remark that even when demanding exhaustive takes of himself, Chaplin would slip into old vaudeville routines when the camera wasn’t rolling to amuse the crew and extras – and, pictured above, even some local children while on location in California in 1918

Chaplin worked well with child actors. Jackie Coogan, pictured above, who would go on to star in The Addams Family as Uncle Fester, was only four when he began work on The Kid. ‘One quality he has which is extraordinary in a child,’ Chaplin said of Coogan, ‘is his ability to repeat a scene without losing interest. I have seen him pick up an object after a dozen rehearsals, with wonder and attention, which would make you believe he was looking at it for the first time’

To complete the scene in City Lights (1931) where the Tramp first meets the blind flower girl, the perfectionist director asked for 360 takes spread over ten months, as he worked out how to convey that the Tramp realises the girl is blind and the girl believes the Tramp to be wealthy. ‘When he began,’ remembered Virginia Cherrill, the novice actress who played the flower girl, ‘he said: “We’ll be done in a few weeks.”’ In all, City Lights filmed on and off for 179 days between 1928 and 1930. It was the longest shoot of Chaplin’s career

‘When I first saw Hitler with that little moustache,’ said Chaplin, ‘I thought he was copying me, taking advantage of my success. I was that egotistical.’ The Nazis saw it differently. They regarded Chaplin as a Jew, though he wasn’t, and banned his films. But amid rising tension in Europe, Chaplin realised that the similarity between him and the Führer offered a great opportunity to lampoon Hitler. However, the proposed film made Hollywood nervous. ‘Jewish producers said it would be a disaster not only for Jews but for American foreign policy,’ remembered the movie’s co-writer, Dan James. And Chaplin, who’d been defiant at first, began to lose his nerve. When President Roosevelt got word of this, he advised Chaplin to proceed with the film

Chaplin, buoyed by presidential support, released The Great Dictator in 1940, entirely financed with his own money. Nazi propaganda claimed that it was ‘an anti-German agitation piece’ playing to half-empty houses. In fact it was Chaplin’s biggest hit in the U.S. and UK, and a hit all over again after the war ended. But the film proved to be a turning point for Chaplin: having resisted talking pictures for more than a decade, it was the first in which he spoke, but it was also the last appearance of the Tramp and his last major hit

For the famous scene in The Gold Rush, where snowbound prospectors Chaplin and fellow actor Mack Swain eat their own shoes, a confectioner made 20 pairs of boots out of liquorice. Chaplin as director, though, demanded 64 takes of the scene. ‘Poor old Mack,’ remembered the director, ‘he had diarrhoea for the last two days. “I cannot eat any more of those damn shoes,” he said’

In 1910, Chaplin, centre in the photo above, and also seen seated far right in this newly discovered photo, sailed with Stan Laurel (far left in top picture), and the rest of their comedy troupe for their first tour of North America. ‘We were all on deck trying to get a first glimpse of the country,’ remembered Laurel later. ‘Charles put his foot up on the rail, swung his arm in one of his burlesque gestures and declared, “America, I am coming to conquer you! Every man, woman, and child shall have my name on their lips!”’

Lita Grey was only 15 when Chaplin cast her in The Gold Rush, and she was only 16 when, during production, she began a relationship with the 35-year-old director, becoming pregnant. ‘What he wanted,’ said Grey, ‘was to arrange for an abortion. His other offer was to pay me $20,000 to marry someone else. I told [my] grandfather, who said: “He’ll marry you or I’ll kill him!”’ Chaplin said of the marriage: ‘It won’t last.’ It didn’t – despite having two children, the couple separated. Trying to come to a settlement, Grey threatened to reveal intimate details of their sex life and Chaplin’s affairs. She received over $800,000

Famous Method actor Marlon Brando, above right with co-star Sophia Loren and Chaplin, far left, starred in Chaplin’s final film, A Countess From Hong Kong [1967]. It didn’t lead to a happy collaboration. ‘It was clear that Brando was expected to imitate Chaplin,’ said film historian Kevin Brownlow after visiting the set. ‘For such a great dramatic actor, such direction must have been bewildering.’ ‘Brando was certainly not suited to the role,’ said Sophia Loren, ‘and he and Charlie knocked heads. Day by day the atmosphere on the set grew worse.’ Brando put it this way: ‘Chaplin wasn’t a man who could direct anybody. A remarkable talent but a monster of a man’