The Swiss mansion that was Charlie Chaplin’s home for his last 25 years will soon become a museum preserving memories of Chaplin the artist, the man and the humanist, his family says.
The estate at Manoir de Ban overlooking Lake Geneva is to open in 2005 as a museum devoted to the life and work of the filmmaker. Chaplin arrived here, aged 63, with his family on January 6,1953.
He took up residence at Domaine de Ban in the Swiss canton of Vaud, where he lived happily for the last 25 years of his life. He was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in 1975 and died onChristmas Day 1977, aged 88.
This magnificent, whitewashed colonnaded mansion built in 1830 in a 13-hectare park overlooking Lake Geneva and the French Alps will become the Charlie Chaplin Museum.
”After my mother’s death, Victoria and Eugene and I rebought the house with the idea of restoring it,” said Michael, one of Chaplin’s eight children by his last wife Oona, daughter of US dramatist Eugene O’Neill.
Michael spent his youth here and later brought up his own family on this estate. ”People kept constantly arriving from all over the world, ringing at the doorbell, wanting to see the house,” he related. ”I realised how much memories of my father were linked to this house.
”This was his home, this is where he spent the last 25 years of his life, and where he was happy.”
The conception for the future museum was developed by Quebec’s Yves Durand, a specialist in museum concepts whose past achievements include Portugal’s leading science museum Visionarium d’Europarque.
Chaplin enthusiast Durand is planning to preserve memories ofthe man he fondly calls ”the noble vagabond.”
It will display exhibits from Chaplin’s life and career, starting with his early childhood on the London music hall stage through to his great Hollywood successes.
It will show the child, the husband, the father, the grandfather, the local lord of the manor — and of course the artist.
Durand also wants to give an idea of an age that saw Chaplin’s art flourish and expand. The Canadian plans to use the cellar space of the house to recreate the simple local premises of 100 years ago, where a dazzled public went to see early flickering images of the cinema in its infancy projected onto white sheets hung up to serve as screens.
”Nickel Odeons smelling of the peel from the oranges sold in the intervals,” he recalled.
Durand also wants to evoke memories of French writer Jean Cocteau, artist Pablo Picasso and other visionary artists and writers who influenced Chaplin, as well as the atmosphere of the early Hollywood that created Chaplin in his original role of tramp, as well as other comic greats Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, and
later stars such as the Marx Brothers.
The ground floor and first floor will contain an exhibition of the home as it was lived in, with the furniture used, family photos, Chaplin’s violin, and the Steinway grand piano presented by Swiss virtuoso Clara Haskil.
And in the garden the little gypsy caravan Chaplin liked to retreat to from time to time. – Sapa-AFP