Chaplin Museum Now Open in Switzerland

[Ann Harding]

It was all over the news last night. The Chaplin museum has finally opened!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... elays.html

Welcome to Chaplin World: Interactive museum celebrating comic actor's life and work finally opens after 15 YEARS of delays
Chaplin’s World is set on the vast estate of Manoir de Ban, in Switzerland
Will include mock-up of a Hollywood studio dedicated to Chaplin’s work
Clips of famous films will also be shown across many screens at the park
Chaplin spent last 25 years of his life in Switzerland after fleeing the US
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 00:52 GMT, 15 April 2016 | UPDATED: 01:03 GMT, 15 April 2016

An interactive museum showcasing the life and works of Charlie Chaplin opens in Switzerland this weekend.

Chaplin’s World, which has been 15 years in the planning, will launch on Sunday, one day after what would have been the British screen legend’s 127th birthday.

The museum is set on the vast estate of Manoir de Ban, about 16 miles from the Swiss city of Lausanne, where Chaplin spent the last 25 years of his life until his death in 1977 aged 88.

He moved to Switzerland after being barred from the United States in the 1950s over suspicions that he had communist sympathies, at the height of paranoia about Soviet infiltration.

A separate building has been constructed nearby as a large mock-up of a Hollywood studio dedicated to Chaplin’s on-screen work, which began in around 1914.

Visitors can also catch a glimpse of the artist’s humble beginnings in South London and his spectacular rise to become one of the biggest and most influential movie legends in Hollywood history.

With clips from his films flickering from a multitude of screens, visitors can walk down ‘Easy Street’, visit the barber shop from ‘The Great Dictator’ and the restaurant where he ate his shoe in ‘The Immigrant’.

Those walking around the new attraction will also be able to move along the cogs within giant machinery as the actor did in ‘Modern Times’, or tumble inside a cabin teetering on the edge of a cliff as he did in ‘Gold Rush’.

One glass case displays the certificate signed by the Queen when Chaplin was knighted in 1975.
And in another is the Oscar he won for the score of his film “Limelight”. However, he didn’t win the Oscar until 1973, since the film was barred for release in the United States when it first came out in 1952.

Chaplin’s World is also dotted with more than 30 wax figures created by the Grevin wax museum in Paris.

The lifelike figures portray Chaplin in different roles, his wife Oona, actors and actresses from his films, friends and people who mattered to him like Albert Einstein, as well as artists inspired by his work, including Michael Jackson and Woody Allen.
His son Michael Chaplin, 70, said: ‘What really touched me is how they managed to make his films come alive again by inserting clips into decors.’

The museum project has faced numerous stumbling blocks over more than 15 years of drawn-out negotiations.

It took seven years to get a building permit, and before that organisers had to wait five years to settle a lawsuit brought by a neighbour worried about the implications of the project.

[PaulDuncan]

The BBC have a video report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36065799

Here is another from the Belfast Telegraph:
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/video ... 34261.html

And there is more here showing the shoes and baggy pants being unwrapped:
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/cha ... d/42093536

And there are pictures of some of the rooms here:
http://www.chaplinsworld.com/le-monde-d ... ie-chaplin

[Scoundrel]

Yet, the UK Telegraph can't even spell his name correctly:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/17/charlie-chaplains-granddaughter-lashes-out-at-angela-merkel-over/

[traccy]

The restaurant where he ate his shoe in ‘The Immigrant’ ?!!

[Jim Roots]

The restaurant where he ate his shoe in ‘The Immigrant’ ?!!

It's right next to the snow cabin he shared with Eric Campbell in "The Gold Rush".

Jim

[missdupont]

We're in a post literate world now so little to no reading and make everything interactive. Like most kids' sections at museums.

[PaulDuncan]

Peter Cowie has written about the museum for the Wall Street Journal:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/little-tram ... 1461104380

A video of the opening, with a tour.
http://www.24heures.ch/news/standard/de ... y/24780347

A photo gallery of the museum:
http://www.24heures.ch/culture/premiere ... 0487?track

24 Heures made a supplement about Chaplin for the opening:
http://chaplin.24heures.ch/