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Entertainment > Film, TV & radio > Films & cinema

Charlie Chaplin (Paperback)

Peter Ackroyd (author)

£12.99

Paperback 288 Pages
Published: 02/04/2015

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Synopsis Author

He was the very first icon of the silver screen, and is one of the most recognisable faces in Hollywood, even a hundred years on from his first film. But what of the man behind the moustache? The director holding the camera as well as acting in front of it?

Peter Ackroyd's new biography turns the spotlight on Chaplin's life as well as his work, from his humble theatrical beginnings in music halls to winning an honorary Academy Award. Everything is here, from the glamour of his golden age to the murky scandals of the 1940s and eventual exile to Switzerland. This masterful brief life offers fresh revelations about one of the most familiar faces of the last century and brings the Little Tramp into vivid colour.

Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9780099287568
Number of pages: 288
Weight: 214 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 18 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

Haunting... Brilliant and unsparing - Simon Callow, Guardian

Compact, engrossing, intelligent - John Carey, Sunday Times

Chaplin's rise makes an enthralling story, and it's one perfectly suited to Peter Ackroyd's prodigious and idiosyncratic talents... Ackroyd acknowledges Chaplin's many human failings, while at the same time giving us a vivid sense of what made the man a genius - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Telegraph

A beautifully judged book, driven by a powerful sense of life’s sadness - Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

[A] fine biography… The luxury of a short book about a vast life cannot be overestimated - Susie Boyt, Financial Times

Peter Ackroyd

Equally praised for his formally experimental fiction, his inventive biographies and his ambitious histories (particularly of his home and birthplace of London), Peter Ackroyd is arguably one of the greatest writers of his generation. With a particular partiality for Victorian and Gothic influences, his most famous novels include: Hawksmoor, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, The English Ghost and his own re-telling of The Canterbury Tales and The Death of King Arthur. His non-fiction ranges widely, encompassing: London the Biography, London the Concise Biography, London Under, Thames: Sacred River, Venice: Pure City, a multi-volume history of London (Foundation, Tudors, Civil War, Revolution) and Queer City as well as biographies of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock.