Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 1, 1993 TAG: 9212310227
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: By Bob Strauss
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
MAKING `CHAPLIN'
In his time, he was the most famous person who had ever lived.Succeeding generations have loved and admired him for his timeless humor and matchless artistry.
His Little Tramp is one of the 20th century's most enduring symbols, as instantly recognizable as Mickey Mouse.
And his life was as legendarily scaled as his reputation, a rags-to-riches story rife with scandal, disappointment, persecution, rejection and, almost inconceivably, an extended happy ending straight out of the movies.
And a few people thought they'd make a film about him.
He, of course, is Charlie Chaplin, still and perhaps forever the greatest movie star the world has ever known. They are Richard Attenborough, Charlie's knightly peer and the Oscar-winning director of "Gandhi," and Robert Downey Jr., a 27-year-old American actor whose previous career high point was a season with the "Saturday Night Live" cast.
Diana Hawkins is Attenborough's longtime business partner. It was her idea to make "Chaplin" after Universal Pictures, where Attenborough has a three-picture deal, declined to make his costly film biography of Revolutionary War figure Tom Paine.
(The movie will open in Roanoke later this month.)
Culling data from Chaplin's autobiography, David Robinson's "Chaplin: His Life and Art" and unprecedented access to family archives through Charlie's late widow, Oona, Hawkins wrote a basic story (screenplay credit goes to William Boyd, Brian Forbes and William Goldman).
Universal liked it better than "Paine." It would cost about half as much to re-create the Victorian London of Chaplin's childhood and the Hollywood he dominated from its pioneer days through its Golden Age. And Oona would toss in location use of the actual Swiss estate where Chaplin resided from his 1952 exile until his death, 15 years ago.
Attenborough, 69, had befriended Charlie and Oona in their twilight years. A performer himself of no mean reputation (he has a major role in Steven Spielberg's upcoming dinosaur extravaganza "Jurrasic Park"), Sir Richard dutifully scoured England and America for the proper actor to play Chaplin.
Not only did the candidate have to resemble Charlie physically, he had to be a superb acrobat, an excellent mime, facile with accents and capable of expressing every emotion imaginable. He also had to be simultaneously young and versatile enough to play the character from his teens through his 80s.
"Olivier thought [Chaplin] was the best actor he'd ever known. W.C. Fields thought he was the greatest ballet dancer that was never a ballet dancer," said Attenborough, whose inextinguishable jollity camouflages steely determination. "The actor had to be balletic, he had to be athletic. He had to have an incredible ear to do Charlie's voice from broad, broad Cockney through to this slightly mannered way in which he eventually spoke, and so on.
"Any actor can do all the stuff with the cane and the hat; [they] shouldn't be in the business if they can't. But to convey the passion and creativity, the genius really, so that you really feel that there's something going on in his work - that's very difficult."
Attenborough said that Downey's screen test, one of a score made by big Hollywood names and total unknowns, leapt out at him. But the actor's name didn't make Universal hearts leap, and rather than risk a more than $30 million budget on an unproven star, the studio stalled.
Unwilling to change his mind, Attenborough insisted that Universal either sign Downey or let go of the project. Universal let go, but before the production could collapse, troubled Carolco Pictures put up the money for Attenborough to do it his way.
Still, for all the support shown by the director, Downey said that the toughest of all the role's myriad demands was projecting Chaplin's consummate showman's confidence.
"You just can't play that," said Downey, whose underground-filmmaker father exposed him to show business as a child. "There's no trying to do what he did, no trying to be anything like what he was. He's one of those people who come around once in a century, and nobody touches him until a century later."
As part of his research, Downey visited the sites of Chaplin's impoverished childhood and, at London's Museum of the Moving Image, even tried on the dusty coat and shoes the master wore in his 1936 masterpiece "Modern Times." But for all his research, for all the careful guidance of his director and associate producer Hawkins, Downey still doubts that he caught the man's essence.
"It's really frustrating because I'm no closer to him now than I was the first time I ever heard his name," said Downey, who revealed that he still watches Chaplin's silent comedies obsessively. "I find him elusive, I don't know how you get past it. The keys to Charlie, in a lot of ways, are in the Tramp, and the Tramp is this very perfect organism."
"Charlie always said, `If you want to understand me, or know anything of my worth, watch my movies,' " Attenborough added.
It was becoming Hollywood royalty, not the Dickensian childhood, that caused most of Charlie's romantic problems. If his life was his work, work was definitely his life; the film shows him stupidly falling for young or unhinged females and neglecting his first three families, so distracted was he by the demands of cinema.
But Geraldine Chaplin, the actress who plays her own, deranged grandmother in Attenborough's film, knew a different Charlie. The eldest of the seven children he had with fourth wife Oona, she mainly knew her father after his career had effectively ended. He seemed an affectionate and attentive, if somewhat elderly, parent; although Geraldine did concede that, "I guess his work was the most important thing.
"I never felt that," she said. "I felt that his commitment was to his family. But every morning, he would go into his working room and sit there all day with paper and pencil, writing scripts or music or his autobiography. He never took a day off."
Geraldine, who laughingly admitted that her own distinguished acting career grew out of exploiting (to his horror) her father's famous name, also revealed that the kids were quite impressed when they found out about Daddy's pre-Oona escapades.
"Obviously, we never knew him with his other wives because we were all from the last one," said Geraldine, who maintains affectionate relationships with half-siblings, such as actor/restaurateur Sydney Chaplin. "We could never quite figure out how many wives he'd had, and we didn't dare ask anyone in the family."
For Downey, whose love for Charlie Chaplin seems no less intense than Geraldine's, the one thing he's confident he does understand about the man is that dark side.
"The difference between my self-destructiveness and his is that he was always operating at 100 percent of his potential," said Downey, who has acknowledged having a share of drug and attitude problems in the past. "He said the place that he always existed was in his work. I always had one foot kind of out the door. Just in case everything fell apart, I could say, `Well, that's not what I really wanted to do anyway.'
"He made a commitment and a sacrifice very early on: that his work was going to be the most important thing. . . . Whatever flack came along with that and whatever tragedies occurred would be secondary or tertiary.
"Now, that might not be fair when you're sharing the planet with other people. But, in a larger way, it's really somewhat . . . Christ-like, to make a sacrifice like that for a greater good, which was his art."