“Stuffy British culture?”
Chaplin learned his craft on the stage in stuffy old England. Fortuitously he lived at a time when motion pictures had just become popular. No one can know whether he’d have had phenomenal success in the British motion picture industry. But I think Chaplin would have said that what he conveyed in silent film was universal — like hunger.
The scale of things in America may have helped him to get the star power that enabled him to do things like establish United Artists and thereby be independent. Not possible now.