  urlLink Charlie Chaplin was a comedic actor and mime. Born to a family of stage performers, Chaplin is said to have begun his career at five years old, when his mother fell suddenly hoarse. He spent his childhood under difficult circumstances in London, and received just two years of formal education in his life. However, he found some success as a child actor, notably as part of the dance and variety troupe Eight Lancashire Lads and in the more formal theater as Billy the Page in Sherlock Holmes . With the help of his brother Sydney, Chaplin became a comedian and eventually went on two tours of America. On his second tour, he caught the eye of Keystone Film Company founder Mack Sennett, and in 1914 Chaplin appeared in his first movie, urlLink Making a Living . His second film, urlLink Kid Auto Races at Venice , saw the first appearance of Chaplin's famous character The Tramp. Chaplin played The Tramp almost continuously until 1940, adding depth and humanity to the character's humor in films such as urlLink The Kid (1921), urlLink The Gold Rush (1925), and urlLink City Lights (1931). In 1919 Chaplin co-founded urlLink United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith. In 1940 Chaplin starred in urlLink The Great Dictator , in which he retired The Tramp and introduced dialogue to his films. In the 1950s Chaplin fell victim to McCarthyism, and went into exile in Europe. He returned to the United States only once, in 1972, when he received a special Oscar for lifetime achievement.
Of debatable sweetness is Chaplin's marital record: he married urlLink four times , to two 16 year-olds, one twenty-something, and when he was 56, one 17 year-old. This last marriage was a success, and Oona and Charlie Chaplin were married for the rest of his life. urlLink Stan Lee was a comic book writer who created several well-known superheroes. Born Stanley Leiber, Lee began working for Timely Comics as an office boy at the age of 17, and he did his first work on an actual comic in 1941, for the third issue of urlLink Captain America .
In 1942 he was promoted to editor at Timely Comics (now known as Marvel Comics), but it was not until the 1960s that he began the experimentation and innovation for which he is now famous. In 1961 he and Jack Kirby produced the urlLink Fantastic Four , and following its success Lee went on to create or co-create 90 percent of urlLink Marvel's characters , including the urlLink Incredible Hulk and the urlLink Amazing Spiderman in 1962, the urlLink X-Men in 1963, and urlLink DareDevil in 1964.
Among the innovations that made Lee's superheroes successful were increased "characterization" - personality flaws, ordinary problems, etc. - and the urlLink Marvel Universe , which allowed the characters to share share storylines and interact with each other. Today there is urlLink debate over the extent to which Lee created some of the characters for which he is given credit. Stan Lee's characters have inspired several movies and television shows, and more than 2 billion of his comic books have been published to date. 
