Charlie Chaplin

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_2141000/2141391.stm

Sunday, 21 July, 2002, 00:54 GMT 01:54 UK
*Chaplin knighthood blocked*

By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online
World Affairs Correspondent

Chaplin's marriages to teenagers raised eyebrows

Confidential Foreign Office papers just released by the Public Record
Office reveal how for years Charlie Chaplin was denied a knighthood.

The papers are being put on the Record Office website from Monday, 22 July.

They include a hostile report on Chaplin by the Foreign Office research
department in 1956.

This drew attention to his "communist" sympathies and to his morals -
his marriages included two to girls aged sixteen and he had once lost a
paternity suit.

It wasn't until 1971 that an official remarked that "a good deal of
water has flowed under the bridge since then" and that "there may be a
feeling that it is time to let bygones be bygones".

Chaplin was eventually knighted in 1975.


--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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