- by Martin Chilton, culture editor
The Charlie Chaplin Museum opens in Switzerland on April 17, 2016, paying tribute to the London-born comedian who was one of Hollywood's most important early stars.
Chaplin's World, which has been in planning for 15 years, will open in the pretty village of Corsier-sur-Vevey on Lake Geneva, some 15 miles from Lausanne.
Chaplin, who was born in Walworth, South London, on April 16, 1889, died aged 88 on Christmas Day 1977.
The museum is on the vast estate of Manoir de Ban, where Chaplin spent the final 25 years of his life with his wife Oona and their eight children.
The Chaplin museum 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 CREDIT: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
In the museum there are relicas of the giant machinery in his 1936 film Modern Times (something Woody Allen paid homage to in Sleeper). Allen, who features as a model in the museum, said of Chaplin's 1928 film The Circus: "The Circus" is just a wonderful good time. The jokes and the execution of them are so brilliant and so uncluttered by anything that can date it. Social ideas and satire on the mores of the time date all the time. His stuff is so beautifully done, and it's as fresh as can be.
The immersive museum also allows visitors to experience being in a cabin teetering on the edge of a cliff, as Chaplin did in Gold Rush.
"He wanted people to remember him. That's why he did the films and he did it in such a perfectionist way," Chaplin's 62-year-old son Eugene told AFP reporter Nina Larson, adding: "I think he would be pleased."
Chaplin moved to Switzerland after being barred from the United States in the Fifties over suspicions that he had communist sympathies, at the height of Senator McCarthy paranoia about Soviet infiltration.