He came up through the English music-hall circuit as a comedy performer, joined Fred Karno’s touring troupe, and traveled to the United States in 1910. A second tour brought him to the attention of Keystone Studios, and he signed with them in 1913. What followed over the next decade was one of the most rapid rises in the history of the entertainment industry. The Tramp — the character built around a battered derby hat, a bamboo cane, baggy trousers, and a waddling walk — became not merely a popular screen persona but an internationally recognized symbol. By the mid-1920s, Chaplin was among the most famous people on earth, recognizable in countries where the language on the intertitles of his films was incomprehensible to most of the audience.
He was not only a performer. He directed his own films, wrote the scripts, composed the music, produced independently, and eventually built his own studio. City Lights, released in 1931, and Modern Times, in 1936, came at a moment when sound films had made the silent style commercially obsolete, yet both succeeded on their own terms. The Great Dictator, in 1940, was his first talking film: a satirical assault on Hitler and Mussolini that required genuine political courage to make and release when it did. The film depicted the Nazi leader as an absurd buffoon at a time when Europe was already at war.
None of this, however, is the context that explains his burial in Switzerland. That context comes later, from the decades after the Second World War, when Chaplin’s long and increasingly public political discomfort with American government reached its climax.