I missed Charlie Chaplin’s birthday by ten days, but I only just stumbled across this footage of Chaplin conducting (at the link below).
While Chaplin was musically illiterate (by which I mean, he couldn’t read sheet music), he taught himself to play piano, violin and cello as a child, which served him well in his early days in the music hall. Later, he composed, or rather worked very closely with trained musicians, to produce the original scores for all of his features and some of his shorter films.
David Raksin, best remembered for his score to “Laura” (1944), assisted Chaplin on the silent classic “Modern Times” (1936). Raksin later revealed that it was he who had essentially scored the film, with Chaplin whistling all the tunes and asking him to make them fit the action.
However, he stressed the process was more complicated than it might at first seem. Chaplin was very much involved with every aspect of his films, and oversaw the development of the music as closely as he did any of the other elements. As a result, such a collaboration could take months, and there wasn’t a note in his scores that he didn’t approve.
Emotions could run high. Raksin recalled he was actually fired once, after only a week and a half, though quickly rehired. When music director Alfred Newman stormed out of one of the recording sessions, Raksin again defied Chaplin, refusing to take up the baton, which only led to further acrimony. The rift was eventually mended and decades later Raksin recollected his work on “Modern Times” as some of the happiest days of his life.
Chaplin’s scores yielded three popular hits: “Smile” from “Modern Times,” a hit for Nat King Cole in 1954; “Terry’s Theme” from “Limelight,” popularized by Jimmy Young as “Eternally” in 1952; and “This Is My Song” from “A Countess in Hong Kong,” recorded by Petula Clark in 1967.
Through a fluke – the belated release of “Limelight” in the United States, on a single screen in Los Angeles, twenty years after it was filmed, coinciding with the disqualification of music from “The Godfather,” after it was learned that Nino Rota had recycled a theme from one of his earlier scores (for the Italian film “Fortunella” in 1958) – Chaplin walked away with his only competitive Oscar, as a composer (!), one month before his 84th birthday.
Previously, he received two honorary Academy Awards, in 1929 and 1972.
