CHARLIE CHAPLIN

Charlie Chaplin was born in 1889 in London. His parents were artists and at 14 years old he became an artist playing Sherlock Holmes. He continued in the cinema. But during McCarthyism the senator McCarthy attacked and accused many people in Hollywood and Charley Chaplin was forced to exile because he was accused of being a communist sympathizer. A file was produced that supposedly detailed his subversive political activities since 1922; we can give the name of “blacklist” to this file. He turned the movie “the great Dictator” in 1940 but it added accusations and everybody talked about it. It was a caricature version of Adolf Hitler, which was seen as being bad taste. After exile he went to Europe in 1952 and was not allowed to return to the US. He made a film, 'The King in New York', in 1957, which was full of criticism of McCarthy and American society in general.