Charlie Chaplin at Home: 10 Photos of the Silent Film Legend’s Offscreen Life

With a bowler hat, a toothbrush mustache, and a crook cane, Charlie Chaplin’s bumbling alter ego the Tramp lit up the big screen. But long before a successful Hollywood career, Chaplin was born into a life of poverty in London; his father left when he was one year old, and his mother was later institutionalized. It wasn’t until he signed with the Fred Karno Company, a British theatrical troupe, that the vaudevillian was able to squeak by in his late teens.

With a salary of about £10 per week, Chaplin and his brother could afford to rent a flat on the top floor of 15 Glenshaw Mansions in London, where they stayed together from 1908 to 1910. It was a “cherished haven,” Chaplin once said, describing the aesthetic as a “combination of a Moorish cigarette shop and a French whorehouse. But we loved it.”

Chaplin’s success in Karno’s company brought him across the pond. He toured the American vaudeville circuit with the music hall impresario and eventually landed a contract with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company in California. The entertainer lived in the US until his dramatic split with the States during the Red Scare of the ’50s.

Writing to Clifford Odets in 1953, Chaplin said that relocating to Europe after about 40 years in America was “just like being out of prison,” according to Richard Carr’s Charlie Chaplin: A Political Biography from Victorian Britain to Modern America. “Living here gives one a perspective on the body politics of the world and America stands out like a large ugly boil.” Below are 10 photos from Chaplin’s life, including many of his later years in Switzerland.

The Kid

By the early 1920s, Chaplin’s film career had taken off; his personal life, however, was in disarray. During the divorce from his second wife, Lita Grey—with whom he worked on his directorial debut The Kid—Chaplin escaped to his attorney Nathan Burkan’s New York City apartment, where he’s pictured here speaking with press. A 1927 newspaper report noted that 50 reporters were there to question Chaplin, who was said to be having a nervous breakdown after Grey’s divorce petition accused him of having “perverted” sexual desires. Chaplin thanked “the public and the press for their attitude toward me in my hour of trial,” adding: “Their willingness to withhold judgement until both sides of the question has been presented is, I consider, a tribute.”

Breakaway house

After years of living in hotels or renting, Chaplin designed a 14-room residence that sat on six-and-a-half acres overlooking Beverly Hills, per a 1990 feature in Architectural Digest. Because the frugal filmmaker used movie studio carpenters to help build the Spanish-style estate, it wasn’t long before things began falling apart—hence its nickname, “Breakaway House.” The star’s abode was set up for entertaining, with a pipe organ and a drop-down movie screen. A long hall stretched the length of the home’s interior. In this 1933 photograph, Chaplin welcomed a visitor from Argentina. “I love this house,” the actor once said, according to his son. “I’d never live anywhere but right here. What more do you want?”

Hollywood living

In 1936, Chaplin married again. His third wife, Paulette Goddard, lived with Chaplin at his Los Angeles home on Summit Drive. Goddard starred in Chaplin’s film Modern Times and was stepmom to his sons Sydney and Charlie Jr., who were both born in the house when he was still married to Grey. Sydney told the Los Angeles Times that he and his brother would swim and play tennis on weekend visits to their father’s home. “Sometimes he was fun to be around,” Sydney said of his dad, “but mainly he was preoccupied with his work.”

Strolling through Switzerland

The tides turned for Chaplin in the mid-1940s and early ’50s. He was involved in an explosive paternity suit with actor Joan Barry and was also facing public accusations of communism. After Chaplin flew to London for the world premiere of his semi-autobiographical 1952 film Limelight—influenced by his fall from grace in the United States—his re-entry permit to the US was revoked, and he chose not to apply for the opportunity to return. He and his fourth wife, Oona O’Neill (seen here in 1953), moved to Switzerland, where they settled at an 1840 neoclassical mansion called Manoir de Ban in Corsier-sur-Vevey. Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps reported that Chaplin discovered the property while on a walk and rang the doorbell on December 7, 1952. It was theirs by December 31.

Growing family

Chaplin fathered eight children with Oona, who was the daughter of famed playwright Eugene O’Neill. This photograph was taken shortly after the birth of Oona and Chaplin’s daughter Jane in May 1957. In filmmaker fashion, Chaplin captured the infant’s early moments alongside siblings Geraldine, Michael, Josephine, Victoria, and Eugene. “We couldn’t have found a more nearly perfect place to live,” Chaplin once told a longtime friend, according to The New Yorker. “The kids can go to the best schools in the world right here. They’ve already learned to speak French. And if Oona and I get bored, we can pop over to London or to Paris in an hour or two.”

Summer vacation

Chaplin and his family did, in fact, vacation in France. Here, the father of 11 is seen with his daughter Josephine during a summer getaway at a seafront villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, a resort town in Southeastern France. Known as “Lo Scoglietto” (Italian for “the little rock”), Chaplin and his family were onetime guests before the property was purchased by actor David Niven in 1962. Twenty years later, the rose-colored villa was reportedly used for a scene in the film Curse of the Pink Panther, which featured Niven in his final role before his death in 1983 from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Today, the seafront escape is known as Fleur du Cap, though it’s no longer available to rent.

Home for the holidays

The couple enjoyed family time on the ground floor of Manoir de Ban, where Chaplin is pictured here in December 1959 with wife Oona and their children shortly after the birth of their daughter Annette. Yves Durand, who helped spearhead the opening of the Chaplin’s World museum in Switzerland, told Le Temps that Chaplin would play violin in the living room and read in his library, explaining that “his books were his Google; he drew his ideas for costumes, sets, and stage design from them.”

Foot rest

After all those years in slapstick, Chaplin broke a bone while working on his final project as a filmmaker, the 1967 British romantic comedy A Countess from Hong Kong starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. While shooting the movie in October 1966, Chaplin reportedly tripped while walking across the grounds at Pinewood Studios, a British film and TV studio in England. He was put in a cast and taken by Rolls Royce to the Savoy in London, where he was told to rest. Claiming that it did “not hurt,” Chaplin said, “I will be back at the studio on Thursday. I can easily work from [a] chair.”

Birthday boy

At Manoir de Ban, the Chaplin family would often dine outdoors on a terrace overlooking the lawn. They enjoyed hosting friends at the grand estate, as was the case in this 1969 shot of the celebration for the film icon’s 80th birthday. But Chaplin and Oona also spent quiet date nights at home when they could finally get a moment away from the kids. “Every once in a while, the old lady and I get out the caviar and champagne,” he once said, according to The New Yorker. “And we don’t invite anybody else. We sit here gorging ourselves. Just the two of us.”

Taking in the view

Manoir de Ban—which now operates as a museum—is set on 37 sprawling acres, where Chaplin once enjoyed the property’s tennis court and swimming pool, as well as a view of Lake Geneva and the Alps. In the final line of the actor’s 1964 memoir, My Autobiography, he wrote about the inner peace he felt being at home: “With such happiness, I sometimes sit out on our terrace at sunset and look over a vast green lawn to the lake in the distance, and beyond the lake to the reassuring mountains, and in this mood think of nothing and enjoy their magnificent serenity.”