Outside the movie theatre in virtually any American town in the late 1910s stood a life-size cardboard figure of Charlie Chaplin. He was pictured in baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered hat. The advertisement would bear the inscription I AM HERE TODAY. An advertisement for a Charlie Chaplin film was a promise of happiness, of that valuable, almost shocking moment when art delivers what life cannot. Eighty years later, Chaplin is still here. In a 1995 worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process - founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W.Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly movie-going was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognizability and helped turn an industry into an art. In 1916, his third year in films, his salary of $10,000 a week made him the highest-paid actor - possibly the highest paid person - in the world. By 1920, “ Chaplinitis,” accompanied by a flood of Chaplin dances, songs, dolls, comic books and cocktails, was rampant . Filmmaker Mack Sennett thought him “just the greatest artist who ever lived”. Other early admirers included George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. In 1923 Hart Crane, who wrote a poem about Chaplin, said his pantomime “represents the hopeless gesture of the poet today”. Later, in the 1950s, Chaplin was one of the icons of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac went on the road because he too wanted to be a tramp. From 1981 to 1987, IBM used the tramp as the logo to advertise its venture into personal computers.