Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The greatest icon in the history of cinema, Charlie Chaplin lived one of the most dramatic rags to riches stories ever told. His life was marked by extraordinary contrasts- the child of London slums who became a multimillionaire; the on-screen clown who was a driven perfectionist behind the cameras;; the adulated star who publicly fell from grace after personal and political scandal. This engrossing and definitive work, the only biography written with full access to Chaplin's archives, tells the whole story of a brilliant, complex man.

Now fully updated with added pictures and an extended filmography, it includes revelatory new material on Chaplin's marriages, his affair with movie star Louise Brooks, his persecution by the FBI during anti-Communist witch hunts - exposing their role in the 'white slavery' case against him - and the significance of Richard Attenborough's film Chaplin .

'I cannot imagine how anyone could write a better book on the great complex subject ... movingly entertaining, awesomely thorough and profoundly respectful.' Sunday Telegraph

'In all, one of the great cinema books; a labour of love, and a splendid achievement.' Variety

'The Life ... that we've long needed ... a combination of warmth towards its subject and judicious setting straight of the records.' Observer

'One of those addictive biographies in which you start by looking in the index for items that interest you ... and as dawn breaks you're reading the book from cover to cover.' Financial Times

'It is a massive work and reflects a massive talent.' The New York Times Book Review

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Working with access to Chaplin's papers, Robinson offers unprecedented insights into Chaplin's methods in this thorough biography and is able to verify the general accuracy of Chaplin's own My Autobiography (1964). Yet because Chaplin is as much the imaginative sum of what others have thought of him as he is the factual totality of what he did, this portrait of him often seems flat and should be read in conjunction with Robinson's other recent study, Chaplin: the mirror of opinion, which in tracing how others have perceived Chaplin and valued his work provides the critical perspective this otherwise excellent biography needs. Despite this reservation, the book deserves to join studies by Theodore Huff (1951; 1972. reprint) and John McCabe ( LJ 6/1/78) as a standard biography. Recommended. Marshall Deutelbaum, English Dept., Purdue Univ., W. Lafayette, Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Film critic for The Times of London, Robinson has written a very long but readable book on the life and works of Chaplin, a study that he sees as a complement to Chaplin's My Autobiography (CH, Nov '64). Robinson was given free access to the Chaplin archive by Chaplin's widow (Oona Chaplin), and this may account for his discreet tone when he writes about Chaplin's last marriage and the many amorous scandals in Chaplin's life. Robinson used Chaplin's private papers, including letters, work notes, and studio records as well as outtakes and rushes from Chaplin's films. Chaplin the artist was a comic genius, a perfectionist, and the first Hollywood comedian to demand retakes. In an appendix, Robinson gives us Chaplin's shooting schedules and the ratios of footage shot to footage included in the finished films from A Dog's Life to Limelight. The ratios were always enormous. The book ends with 160 pages of notes, appendixes, a Chaplin chronology, filmography, bibliography, index, and a Chaplin's Who's Who. In one appendix there is a summary of the 1,900-page FBI file on Chaplin, material made available too late to be included in the text. Eighty pages of photographs. Highly recommended for all film collections.-W.K. Huck, Idaho State University

Kirkus Book Review

A strong Chaplin biography, chockablock with the nuts and bolts of filmmaking as derived from Chaplin's own working papers and studio re. ports, by a noted British film critic-historian (Chaplin--The Mirror of Opinion and Buster Keaton). Robinson was also granted access by Lady Oona to her husband's closely guarded private papers, records and letters. Robinson is consistently reserved about his responses to finished works, especially those of Chaplin's later life (Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong), which have their moments but surely show the master's hand wavering with diminished energies. In fact, after the half-success of The Great Dictator it cannot be said that Chaplin survived the talkies (his are too talky by half). His talkies are dealt with at fair depth, but it is the earlier silents about Charlie (and Chaplin's superb non-Tramp, full-length A Woman of Paris) that percolate most on the page. Robinson is bettered as a silent film-comedy esthete by Walter Kerr's richly mulled The Silent Clowns (1975), still the most stimulating criticism in Chaplin literature. For that matter, the first 11 chapters of Chaplin's My Autobiography (published when he was 75) covering his Dickensian childhood, early years in the British music halls and first years in films, are more absorbing than Robinson's dense but secondhand pages about the same period. Where Robinson is stronger than Chaplin is in bringing together the contributions of Chaplin's closest collaborators, several of whom are dropped into darkness in Chaplin's own account. Robinson also makes some curious omissions, especially the old man's response to his eldest daughter Geraldine's brilliantly inventive film acting; and no mention is made of Eugene O'Neill disowning his daughter Oona when at 18 she married 54-year-old Chaplin--as it turned out, a marriage blessed by the gods. Chaplin's life moves from Victorian and Edwardian London through the Keystone days with Mack Sennett, his branching out on his own into Essanday and Mutual films, which produced the glories of The Pawnshop, The Rink and Easy Street, his union with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith to create United Artists, and then his masterpieces, The Kid, The Idle Class, The Gold Rush, City Lights and Modern Times. Along the way are legal problems, paternity suits and scandals with nymphets (he seems to have fixed on 15-year-olds), battles with McCarthyism, exile, happy days in his Swiss mansion, final years of acclaim back in Hollywood, and knighthood. Throughout he remains the shy, gentle, benign but temperamental dictator who could not personally fire a single subordinate. A winner, memorable for the full-dress portrait of the man, but even more for the inside look at silent picture-making by a genius. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

David Robinson is a celebrated film critic and historian who wrote for The Times and the Financial Times for several decades. His many books include World Cinema , Hollywood in the Twenties and Buster Keaton .