PARIS: Film actor Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) is to be at the center of a new museum that is to open near Geneva in 2005, not far away from Vevey where he died on Christmas day of 1977 and where he spent the last 50 years of his life, the side of the former Oona O’Neill, the woman he married in 1943 when she was 18 and he 54 years old.

Indeed, the official announcement of the decision by the family of Chaplin — best known as the “little tramp” — to collaborate actively with the museum, to provide it with much of its own archival holdings is expected for Christmas day of this year, which marks the 25th anniversary of Chaplin’s death.

Son Michael Chaplin says that the new museum has the “unanimous support” of all of the actor-director’s eight children. The family recently released some of the many home movies and outtakes from his professional films that are accumulated at the Chaplin house near Geneva and the French border.

One of Chaplin’s best-known films, The Great Dictator (1940), was recently re-released in France to great popular success. Outtakes from the original film as well as footage shot of the making of this film by his brother Sidney were recently released In DVD format.

On 3 March 1978 Chaplin’s dead body was stolen from the Sur-Vevey cemetery, not far away from the museum that will bear his name. It took until 18 May for police to locate his remains.

Born in London on 16 April 1889, Chaplin’s parents, Charles and Hannah Chaplin, were music hall entertainers.In his first stage appearance at age five Charlie sang a song in place of his mother who had become ill. At eight he toured in a musical “The Eight Lancaster Lads”. Nearly eleven, he appeared in “Giddy Ostende” at London’s Hippodrome. From age 17 to 24 he was with Fred Karno’s English vaudeville troupe which brought him to New York in 1910, aged 21.

It was the United States which both made and broke Chaplin as although he became an international movie landmark with such films as The Circus, A Woman of Paris and The Kid, he was hounded for his political views and freewheeling lifestyle (in 1943 he was unfairly accused of fathering a child). In 1952, tired of the political and moral controversies which his presence in the United States inspired, he decided to leave the United States for good, making his way to Switzerland where he settled near Geneva.