Charlie Chaplin's London childhood was marked by what were to become the themes of his silent comedies: poverty, cruelty, and loneliness. When his father died of alcoholism and his mother became insane, he and his brother were forced into a workhouse, which Chaplin escaped by entering the theater.
Later while on tour in the United States with a music hall revue, he was hired by Mack Sennett, a film producer for Keystone Studio, known for broad comic spectacles of anarchic violence. It was a style at odds with that which Chaplin had perfected in his vaudeville routines, so, when he began to direct himself in his own films, he made changes in Keystone's frenetic world of farce, developing recurring characters to create comedies filled with emotion and slapstick pathos.
Chaplin's best known character was the little tramp, whose fussy mustache, walking stick, worn bowler hat, and baggy pants with oversized tails suggested both personal dignity and poverty. The tramp debuted in Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914). Chaplin used the tramp and other characters to generate comedy out of the widening social gap of the post-WW I period. The gap between rich and poor, rural and urban, immigrant and native is evident in such films as The Tramp, The Immigrant, The Kid, The Gold Rush, and The Circus, which won him an Oscar.
Mime was perhaps Chaplin's most powerful tool: He used it to give voice to those who could not speak, illustrating their deprivation, as in the boot-eating scene in The Gold Rush. It was an important part of his subtle acting style, which eschewed the techniques of melodramatic stage acting to psychologize action, showing it as motivated by character rather than by an external force or a plot device like a gag. He helped center comedy on characters and performers, rather than on the events that befell them, paving the way for such comedians as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Chaplin also favored a comedy of space, that is developing narrative and