His method was remarkable, and unique in his work. Clearly he was also thinking of his own present bitter experience of a faithless public.Ĭhaplin spent more than two years writing Limelight.
Chaplin said that he based the character on real-life stage personalities whom he had seen lose their gifts and their public - the American black-face comedian Frank Tinney (1878-1940) and the Spanish clown Marceline (1873-1927) with whom he had himself worked as a boy. His story concerns a once-famous comedian who has lost the ability to command his audience. He found it in bitter-sweet nostalgia for the world of his youth - the world of the London music halls at the opening of the 20th century, where he had first discovered his genius as an entertainer. Not surprisingly, then, in choosing his next subject he deliberately sought escape from disagreeable contemporary reality. In this atmosphere, his 1947 film, Monsieur Verdoux with its sardonic view of war, was attacked as being anti-American. Pilloried as he was by the right-wing press and reactionary institutions like the American Legion, it seemed that America had turned against the man it had once idolised. It did not help that he had recently been cited in an unseemly paternity suit. In the late 1940s, America’s Cold War paranoia reached its peak, and Chaplin, as a foreigner with liberal and humanist sympathies, was a prime target for political witch-hunters. Claire Bloom and Chaplin in Limelight, 1952Ĭharles Chaplin made Limelight at the most troubled period of his adult career.
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