#17: Charlie Chaplin
Comedy looks wonderfully effortless when all the preparation has been erased. For The Circus (1928), Chaplin and co-star Harry Crocker spent weeks learning tightrope skills for a sequence in which the Little Tramp finds himself stranded on the wire with escaped monkeys crawling over him. A safety arrangement was used, but Chaplin still had to perform the balancing act while live animals tugged at his clothing and disrupted the carefully timed routine.
