Secret files reveal his true nationality is only a guess, writes Tom Whitehead

THE British Security Service investigated Charlie Chaplin to see whether he was a Frenchman, or a Russian Jew called Israel Thornstein.

According to previously secret files, intelligence officers could find no trace of the Hollywood star's birth in Britain, despite his claim that he was born in London in 1889. The mystery surrounding his origins emerged when the US authorities asked MI5 to look into Chaplin's background after he left the US in 1952 under a cloud of suspicion over his communist links.

British officers could find no birth certificate and the earliest official record was a passport issued in 1920.

They investigated suggestions that he was born in Fontainebleau, near Paris, or nearby Melun. The Americans claimed his real name was Israel Thornstein and raised the idea he may have been a Russian Jew. MI5 could find no evidence of any of the claims, leaving his origins a mystery to this day.

But British intelligence rejected US claims that Chaplin was a high-risk communist, concluding that although he may have been a "sympathiser", he was no more than a "progressive or radical". Agents said he was not a security risk but accepted that his name had been "exploited in the interests of communism" as one of the victims of McCarthyism, the US anti-communist campaign led by Senator Joe McCarthy.

Chaplin's MI5 files, released by the National Archives in Kew, west London, indicate that British agents agreed that he had given funds to communist front organisations, but that the US could not prove his party membership.

Chaplin said he was born on April 16 1889 in East Street, Walworth, south London, four days before the birth of Adolf Hitler, who he lampooned in his classic 1940 film, The Great Dictator.

But after searching Somerset House in London for his birth certificate, MI5 concluded: "It would seem that Chaplin was either not born in this country or that his name at birth was other than those mentioned."

Scotland Yard's Special Branch added to the intrigue by passing on a tip from a source who claimed the actor was born near Fontainebleau. MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, investigated further but found no trace of Chaplin's birth in France either.

John Marriott, who was head of MI5's counter-subversion branch, was not convinced that the absence of a birth certificate was a concern. "It is curious that we can find no record of Chaplin's birth, but I scarcely think this is of any security significance," he noted.

One possible answer to the mystery emerged last year when Chaplin's family found a letter suggesting that he had been born in a Gypsy camp in Smethwick, near Birmingham. It is known that Chaplin's mother, Hannah Hill, was descended from "travellers" (as Gypsies are known today).

Having escaped poverty to launch a career in British music hall theatre, Chaplin moved to the US in 1910 and made a series of hugely successful films in Hollywood in his persona of the Little Tramp. In the early 1950s, when Washington was in the grip of McCarthyist paranoia about Soviet infiltration, he became reviled as a communist sympathiser.

There was further controversy about issues such as his two marriages to 16-year-old girls, failure to accept US citizenship, claims that he fathered an illegitimate child and owed $2-million in back taxes.

Chaplin and his family sailed to Britain in September 1952 to attend the premiere of his new film, Limelight. While they were out of the country, the US announced he would be denied a re-entry permit because of his alleged Soviet connections. He then settled in Switzerland.

For nearly 20 years the British government blocked a knighthood for Chaplin because of US concern about his private life, but he was knighted in 1975. He died on Christmas Day 1977, aged 88. - ©The Daily Telegraph