Chaplin estate to be museum

To mark the handing over of this personal, beautiful property to the public, a mighty collection of the little tramp's children and grandchildren returned to Switzerland in order to open up their home and hearts to a press who have always been kept at arms reach until now.

'For me he was a father, I've always seen him as a father' says youngest son Eugene. As a kid I used to watch the films, I'd see the little tramp, but I never really related that little tramp to him, I knew it, but it was like in theory.'

That little tramp set on track the course of cinematic history.

Scripting, starring in, directing and distributing full feature films, Charlie Chaplin's power was so great that when his message proved more potent than entertaining, the American authorities decided to ban him from returning to his home town of New York. After the release of films like 1942's The Great Dictator - where Chaplin presents Hitler as a mad, silly figure to be ridiculed - Chaplin's popularity went downhill.

Faced with a ban on returning to the US, Chaplin found himself a home in the Swiss town of Vevey. And he brought with him to Switzerland his new wife Oona O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene (who disinherited his daughter for marrying Chaplin).

Geraldine came with her parents to Switzerland at eight years of age. Happy to be the daughter of 'the most famous man in the world and the most beautiful woman in the world. And unaware until she was a lot older of her father's appetite for young girls:

'I didn't know about that until a lot later until I was guess, I don't know, fifteen or sixteen, and then I thought it, well very glamorous, yes, oh yes, my father was with all these young girls. I mean it was not seen as such a horrible thing as it is today. And after all my mother was seventeen when she married him and he was 52, so he was a dirty old man!

Turning the Manoir de Ban into a Charlie Chaplin museum is a mighty task and will not be ready for at least two years. Old silent film sets are going to be mocked up; the Victorian England that Charlie grew up in is going to be created in the cellar below; the whole experience will explain the story of cinema up to the arrival of sound.

For Eugene and his wife Bernadette, Michael and his wife Pauline, and their collective ten children - all of whom have been living at the Manoir de Ban for the past eleven years - it means a new journey. 'I don't totally realise it for the minute' says Eugene, 'but to tell you the truth, one part of me is sad, of course, and the other side of me is very pleased to know this is becoming a museum because in a way, we'll still be able to come back to it.'