The Great Dictator

Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and... continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919. Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films.
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George Wheeler Dryden was an English actor and film director, the son of Hannah Chaplin and music hall entertainer Leo Dryden and thus the half brother of Charles and Sydney Chaplin. He was also the father of rock musician Spencer Dryden. Dryden was the youngest of Hannah Chaplin's children, and... his father Leo removed him from his mentally troubled mother as an infant. He was touring India and the Far East as a vaudeville comedian in 1915 when he first learned from his father that the newly famous Charlie Chaplin was his half brother. At this point, he wrote several letters to Chaplin and his half-brother Sydney but got ignored by both of them. In 1917, he got in touch with Chaplin's lead actress Edna Purviance who is thought to have convinced Chaplin to recognize him as his relative. He then joined the Chaplin brothers and their mother in America in 1918, and became a U.S. citizen in 1936. He later appeared in Stan Laurel's Mud and Sand and was the "other man" in the melodrama False Women.
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