Sydney Chaplin - Early Life

Early Life

Chaplin was born as Sidney John Hill, to 19-year-old Hannah Hill in London. There is a mystery as to who was Sydney’s father. The story is that it was a man named Hawkes, but there is no record of Hannah’s marriage to a Mr. Hawkes. He began using the Chaplin surname following his mother's marriage to Charles Chaplin Sr., a year after his birth. While Syd and brother Charlie were in the Cuckoo Schools in Hanwell following his mother's mental collapse, Syd was placed in the programme designed to train young boys to become seamen, on the Exmouth training ship docked at Grays, Essex. He followed this training period with several years working on ships, receiving high marks from all of his employers. But his ambition was to get into the entertainment business and he left his final voyage with that in mind.

Charlie and Sydney worked briefly together in one of their first stage appearances, the play Sherlock Holmes in 1905. Syd was briefly cast as a villain in that play. In 1906, however, he landed a contract with Fred Karno, of Karno's London Comedians and was to fight hard to bring Charlie into the company two years later. Charlie never achieved the sort of fame Syd did as a principal comedian for that company, but that was to be the only time that Syd was able to outdo his brother—at least in front of an audience.

After Charlie achieved world-wide fame in the 1910s, the brothers discovered they had another half-brother through their mother, Wheeler Dryden, who had been removed from his mother's care as an infant and brought up abroad by his father. Wheeler was also an actor, and the brothers reunited in Hollywood in 1918, occasionally working together at Chaplin's studio through to the 1950s.