"Psychiatrist Weissman offers a fascinating, analytic portrait of a most complex man, who from 1915 to the mid-1930s was the most famous person in the world. Chaplin's near-Dickensian childhood was one of squalid poverty in London. Both parents were in show business, and alcoholism and syphilis blighted their lives.... According to Weissman, Chaplin recreated his painful childhood over and over in his movies, especially through the adventures of Chaplin's archetypal film persona, the Little Tramp, the comical and lovable Everyman who never gives up. Weissman finds many parallels between Chaplin's upbringing and what he presented on the big screen; indeed, he maintains that the films are deeply personal statements reflecting the formative influence of early poverty on his artistic development. Besides being a captivating psychological study of a seminal figure in motion-picture history, the book is an engaging survey of early Hollywood filmmaking."—Booklist