The following excerpt is from an AP article by Jill Lawless posted February 20, 2012 at the dailynewsegypt.com:
They foiled plots and cracked Nazi codes, but Britain’s spies were unable to solve the mystery of Charlie Chaplin‘s birth.
Although the entertainer is celebrated as one of London’s most famous sons, newly declassified files reveal that Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence service found no records to back up Chaplin’s claim that he was born in the city on April 16, 1889.
Uncertainty about Chaplin’s origins linger to this day — a mystery Chaplin himself may have helped to nurture.
The previously secret file, released Friday by Britain’s National Archives, shows that MI5 investigated the silent film star in the 1950s at the request of US authorities, who had long suspected him of communist sympathies. MI5 historian Christopher Andrew said the FBI’s red-hating chief, J. Edgar Hoover, privately denounced Chaplin as “one of Hollywood’s parlor Bolsheviks.”
To the spies’ surprise, there was no record of the performer’s birth.
“It would seem that Chaplin was either not born in this country or that his name at birth was other than those mentioned,” MI5 concluded.
Chaplin’s life is a Dickensian rags-to-riches story. Raised in London in a family of music-hall entertainers, he moved to the United States in 1910 and became one of Hollywood’s first megastars with his shabby, bowler-hatted everyman persona, the Little Tramp.
He was a box office sensation in movies such as “The Gold Rush,” ”City Lights” and “The Kid,” but his left-wing friends and activities alarmed the FBI, which began tracking the actor in the early 1920s.
In 1952, as fears of Soviet infiltration raged in the US, American authorities asked MI5 to investigate Chaplin’s political allegiances and personal background, including a long-standing rumor that Charlie Chaplin was an alias and the performer’s true name was Israel Thornstein.
But British spies could find no trace of him in the birth records at London’s Somerset House under Chaplin, Thornstein or Harley, his mother’s stage name.
