Unit2_passage_english_a

Chaplin quit Britain for good in 1913 when he journeyed to America with a group of performers to do his <5>comedy</5> act on the stage, where talent <6>scouts</6> recruited him to work for Mack Sennett, the king of Hollywood comedy films.
<P1>Dickens might have created Charlie Chaplin's childhood.
But only Charlie n could have created the great <2>comic</2> character of "the Tramp", the little man in <3>rags</3> who gave his creator permanent fame.
He was born in a poor area of South London.
He wore his mother's old red stockings cut down for <1>ankle</1> socks.
His mother was temporarily declared mad.
<P7>He already had the urge to explore and extend a talent he discovered in himself as he went along.
"It can't be me. Is that possible? How <19>extraordinary</19>," is how he greeted the first sight of himself as the Tramp on the screen.
He <14>postponed</14> that day as long as possible: In <em>Modern Times</em> in 1936, the first film in which he was heard as a singing waiter, he made up a <15>nonsense</15> language which sounded like no known nationality.
This physical transformation, plus the skill with which he <23>executed</23> it again and again, is surely the secret of Chaplin's great comedy.
He also had a deep need to be loved—and a corresponding fear of being <24>betrayed</24>.
The Tramp never loses his faith in the flower girl who'll be waiting to walk into the <26>sunset</26> with him; while the other side of Chaplin makes Monsieur Verdoux, the French wife killer, into a symbol of hatred for women.
He was an <18>immensely</18> talented man, determined to a degree unusual even in the ranks of Hollywood stars.
His huge fame gave him the freedom—and, more importantly, the money—to be his own master.
He later said he imagined the Tramp to be a college-educated gentleman who'd come down in the world.
But if he'd been able to speak with an educated accent in those early short comedies, it's <16>doubtful</16> if he would have achieved world fame.
Sad to say, many English people in the 1920s and 1930s thought Chaplin's Tramp a bit, well, "<7>crude</7>".
<P3>Certainly middle-class audiences did; the working-class audiences were more likely to <8>clap</8> for a character who <9>revolted</9> against authority, using his wicked little cane to trip it up, or aiming the <10>heel</10> of his boot for a well-placed kick at its broad rear.
Then again, <P5>the Tramp's quick eye for a pretty girl had a <12>coarse</12> way about it that was considered, well, not quite nice by English audiences—that's how foreigners behaved, wasn't it?
And the English would have been sure to find it "odd". No one was certain whether Chaplin did it on purpose but this helped to bring about his huge success.
<P9>The two were hard to combine and sometimes—as in his early marriages—the <25>collision</25> between them resulted in disaster.
Yet even this painfully-bought self-knowledge found its way into his comic creations.
Other countries—France, Italy, Spain, even Japan—<P2>have provided more <4>applause</4> (and profit) where Chaplin is concerned than the land of his birth.
But that shock <20>roused</20> his imagination.
Chaplin didn't have his jokes written into a <21>script</21> in advance; he was the kind of comic who used his physical senses to invent his art as he went along.
<P6>But for over half of his screen career, Chaplin had no screen voice to confirm his British <13>nationality</13>.
Indeed, it was a headache for Chaplin when he could no longer resist the talking movies and had to find "the right voice" for his Tramp.
<P8>Lifeless objects especially helped Chaplin make "contact" with himself as an artist.
He turned them into other kinds of objects.
Thus, a broken alarm clock in the movie <em>The Pawnbroker</em> became a "sick" patient undergoing surgery; boots were boiled in his film <em>The Gold Rush</em> and their soles eaten with salt and <22>pepper</22> like prime cuts of fish (the nails being removed like fish bones).