Chaplins Music Hall

Product Description

Charlie Chaplin grew up in & around the music hall. His parents aunt & their friends all earned their precarious livings on the stage & Chaplin himself started out his career touring music halls with a dance troupe. His experiences of the culture of the music hall were a major influence shaping his style of acting & the films he made most famously Limelight which tells the story of a failing variety performer & which evoked painful memories of his own past. Chaplin was horrified to see how performers lives were ruined when their audience turned against them & he was relieved to exchange the stresses of live performance for screen comedy. Barry Anthony here tells the story of the lives & careers of Chaplins family & their music-hall circle
- from dashing Eva Lester to the great Fred Karno & from Chaplins parents Hannah Hill & Charles Chaplin to The Great Calvero himself. He reveals the difficult & often-tragic lives of Londons variety community in the late-Victorian & Edwardian years a time of great change in the music hall & entertainment scene & in doing so sheds important new light on the inspiration behind Chaplins genius providing a fascinatingly fresh perspective on this popular cultural icon of the twentieth century.