UK Refused Knighthood for Chaplin in Deference to Us

The comedian Charlie Chaplin - viewed as perhaps the greatest popular artist of his century - was denied a knighthood until his old age because of the government's fears of US anger at the honour.

He was also debarred from an alternative high accolade, as Companion of Honour, for the same reason.

This was disclosed yesterday in freshly declassified Foreign Office papers released by the public record office.

The veto, decided in October 1956, delayed Chaplin's knighthood until 1975 when he was 86. He died two years later.

There was also Foreign Office concern about the actor's history of sexual interest in teenage women, though this had ceased nearly 20 years previously. But the decision to debar him came at the height of the cold war, in the month when Britain hoped for and needed US support for its secretly planned invasion of Suez.

Also in October, revolution broke out against communist rule in Hungary. It was savagely quelled, making communism infamous.

Chaplin, whose silent film masterpiece Modern Times is a critique of industrial capitalism, had publicly supported communist front organisations. In 1956 he had had dinner with the Soviet prime minister, Nikolai Bulganin. Two years earlier he dined with the Chinese communist prime minister Chou Enlai.

In 1952 he was refused a visa to re-enter the US after being named as a communist sympathiser by the US unamerican activities committee.

In one of the newly disclosed papers the FO's research department advised: "While there is undeniably still much admiration for Mr Chaplin as an artist - even among those Americans who neither agree with his politics nor condone his morals - there has been remarkably little disposition, outside leftwing circles, to question the action... in virtually debarring his re-entry into the US."

Another official wrote: "Mr Chaplin is a most controversial character and cannot be recommended for the Companion of Honour."

At the first Academy Award ceremony in 1929 Chaplin received an honorary Oscar for his "versatility and genius".

In 1973 a second honorary Oscar was bestowed on him for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of the century".