A museum showcasing the life and works of Charlie Chaplin will finally open at his former Swiss home today after more than 15 years of planning. Kevin Galea gets a glimpse of the artist’s humble beginnings in London and his spectacular rise to become one of the biggest, most influential legends in Hollywood history.

Charlie Chaplin’s half-brother, Sydney, founded the first privately-owned airline in the US. His show business career ended in bankruptcy after he was involved in a sex scandal with actress Molly Wright in which he was accused of biting off her nipple just before filming The Mummy Birds… Charlie Chaplin liked Gruyere cream on his strawberries… and only ate shoes made of liquorice.

You will learn such things at the new Chaplin Museum in his former home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, overlooking Lake Geneva.

Sir Charles lived amid the Lavaux vineyards in the Manoir de Ban on the Vaud Swiss Riviera, an hour from Geneva until his death on Christmas Day in 1977. His former home is opening as a museum today.

Hounded by the FBI for his alleged communist sympathies and by the press over multiple paternity suits, he refused to return to moral pomposity of the US, an unhappy country with its hate-beleaguered atmosphere.

In Switzerland he wrote the screenplays for A King of New York and The Countess of Hong Kong (1966). He also wrote his autobiography at Corsier. In it he describes the domain as 37 acres, with an orchard. In front of the terrace is a five-acre lawn with magnificent tall trees, which frame the mountains and the lake in the distance.

Chaplin is the area’s most famous modern resident although Graham Greene and Audrey Hepburn lived close by. David Niven is buried in Chateau d’Oex. The novelist Vladimir Nabakov lived at the Montreux Palace.

Charlie Chaplin became a global brand

But it is still Charlot (Little Charlie) Country. The 19-room, three-level neo-classical mansion was built in 1840. Its previous owners included a watchmaker, an industrialist, two sisters and an American diplomat.

The 150-acre eco-friendly engineered Chaplin’s world theme park and Modern Times Museum complex will feature successive multi-media experiences, ambiophonic acoustics, immersive décor, a Gold Rush Café, a Limelight Restaurant and display previously unseen private photographs, letters, manuscripts, personal things and other memorabilia. His writing desk will be on display as well, as some of the Manoir’s original Louis XIV furniture.

There will also be a special walkway to Chaplin’s grave.

Scenes from classic films will be shown continuously. Such as The Dance of the Rolls and eating his boot, both in The Gold Rush. His boot was actually made from liquorice.

In 1987 Christie’s sold his cane and hat for £82,000. The museum traces Chaplin’s extraordinary rags to riches career. From a Lambeth workhouse to meeting royalty and the likes of Gandhi, Churchill, Khrushchev and Einstein who wept at the premier of City Lights (1931).

Chaplin was born in Walworth, south London in 1889, the son of vaudevillian and a soubrette (operatic soprano), an Irish cobbler’s daughter.

His childhood, he wrote in My Autobiography (1964) was in continual crisis, his life a quagmire of miserable circumstances.

One of the museum sites, Le Manoir de Ban.

The museum chronicles jobs such as doctor’s dogsbody, pageboy, flower-seller, glass-blower for a day and toy-maker, making boats from shoeboxes and grape packing straw.

It tells of his father’s alcoholism and early death (his daily diet was six raw eggs in port wine), homes next to graveyards, abattoirs and pickle factories, Charlie’s first sight of the sea at Southend after finding a purse on a bus, the homes for destitute children and his syphilitic mother eventually being sent to a lunatic asylum.

It also tells of his early influences – his mother who was a mimic, his showbiz debut in Aldershot standing in for his mother when she was booed off stage, the clown Dan Leno and French comedian Max Linder, his formative years of clog dancing with the Eight Lancashire Lads, a two-year run in the stage show Sherlock Holmes and the 21-month tour of the US with Fred Karno, the father of slapstick.

For two pence a day, plus a bread and jam breakfast, he performed from New York to Montana. One of his first comic characters was the inebriate swell.

Chaplin became the film industry’s first international superstar, one of the most famous and richest men in the world. And a global brand.

There are statues to him in Hyderabad, Barcelona, Waterville in Ireland (where the family holidayed), London and Vevey waterfront.