Chaplin's home to open as museum

THE VAST mansion where Charlie Chaplin spent his last 24 years is to be turned into a museum dedicated to his life and the history of cinema in the 20th century.­

Fifteen kilometres out of Lausanne, the mansion in English colonial style with its white colonades, set in a magnificent wooded park of 13 hectares, was where Chaplin chose to settle in 1953 with his wife Oona and their eight children. From the terrace you can see Lake Geneva and the Alps in the distance.­

An agreement was signed this week by the Charlie Chaplin museum foundation to sell the Ban manor house to Luxembourg investors to transform it into a museum recreating the magic universe of the beloved Little Tramp. The project is expected to cost 35 million Swiss francs (30 million dollars, 21 million euros).­ "We have got massive archives, interviews, films and family photos and his first contracts, which we are going to put on display in a dynamic way," says Canadian Yves Durand, a Chaplin enthusiast involved in setting up the museum.­

The former staff quarters are to be turned into a 200-seat cinema while tapes of Chaplin talking about the secrets of his art will be played to bring alive displays in some of the rooms of the house.­

Philippe Meylan, the museum's promoter and architect, said: "We plan to put the furniture back where it was when the family was living here." In the salon the grand piano, which the eminent Swiss-Romanian pianist and Vevey resident Clara Haskil would play when she called on Chaplin, still has pride of place.­

Visitors to the museum will have access to the most intimate rooms occupied by the Chaplin family, including the first floor room where he died on Christmas Day 1977.­ In the vast vaulted cellars the museum's designers plan to install a 'Hollywood street' complete with street lamps to recreate the atmosphere of the 1920s.­

Today the space is largely empty but for, high on a dusty shelf, a wooden box containing an angel costume which Chaplin designed for one of his daughters.­ Until last year the house had still been lived in by Chaplin's descendants.­ "I came here to live about 15 years ago after the death of my mother," recalled Michael, one of Chaplin's sons, who settled here with five of his seven children alongside his brother Eugene, himself a father of five.­

"Regularly people used to ring at the door to ask to visit. They came from China, Latin America, Africa. It was extraordinary to see how universally famous my father was.­ That is what gave us the idea of turning it into a museum, we felt we owed it to them."

Three of Chaplin's eight children jointly owned the house: Eugene, Victoria and Michael. But the upkeep was steep and it was tempting to sell to the highest bidder.­ "Michael Jackson was very interested, he came several times," Meylan recalled.

Funny walk still a laugh

­THIRTY YEARS after his death, Charlie Chaplin's silly moustache and funny walk are as popular as ever, largely thanks to the restoration of his old movies by the Bologna film archive in Italy and to France's MK2 film company, which has bought up the rights.­

Chaplin died 30 years ago this week, on December 25, 1977, but the biting burlesque of works such as 'The Gold Rush', 'The Kid' and his last silent movie 'Modern Times' have stood the test of time, wowing film-lovers from Bangladesh to Brazil.­

Since 2001, some 2.8 million Chaplin DVDs have been sold worldwide, including 725,000 in Spain, 420,000 in the US, 300,000 in Britain and France and 100,000 in Brazil.­ Yet in the late 1990s, Chaplin had all but slipped off the movie map. Copies of his films had aged and were rarely screened, prompting his descendants to loook around for a way to give them a second life.­

It was during those years that films by the then late French filmmaker Franûois Truffaut were re-issued as DVDs by MK2.­ "These high-quality editions allowed us to show what we could do, to position ourselves at the top end of DVD productions," said Nathanael Karmitz, who with his father Marin runs MK2.