He rose from the slums of Victorian London to become arguably cinema’s first great comic artist, with The Great Dictator and Limelight among his masterpieces.

Now the script of Charlie Chaplin’s unfinished final film is to be published, having been pieced together from drafts, storyboards and sketches, on which he had been working before his death in 1977, at the age of 88.

Titled The Freak, it is a fantasy about “a beautiful creature with wings … a bird with a human body”, as Chaplin wrote of an otherworldly female creature named Sarapha, which has the power to cure illness and bring peace to the world.

The comic genius, who created the Little Tramp with his trademark bowler hat and cane, planned to appear in a cameo role as a startled drunk who watches her fly above him in the Londo

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