Newly released documents from Britain's National Archives show that the British security service MI5 opened a file on actor Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which was seeking to ban the actor from the U.S. for alleged ties to the Communist Party, The Guardian reports.

The file was opened in 1952, the BBC says, during the depths of the the Cold War McCarthy Era, when it was reported that Chaplin had made a covert donation to the American Communist Party in 1923 when the British silent film sensation was at the height of his fame.

"Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.

MI5, The Guardian reports, noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad."

DOWNLOAD: The MI5 file on Charlie Chaplin

The BBC says Chaplin had come to London in 1952 for the premiere of his latest film, Limelight, but was refused entry back into the U.S. Chaplin, who died in 1977, returned to the United States only once, to collect an honorary Oscar in 1972.

The file is filled with intercepted newspaper clippings, letters, telegrams and diplomatic exchanges, including a suggestion from the FBI that Chaplin's real name was Israel Thorstein. MI5 searched but turned up nothing.

The inquiry, however, did find that British officials were unable to determine where or when Chaplin was born, although Chaplin's biographer says that was not uncommon for the period.

Chaplin's MI5 file concludes: "It may be that Chaplin is a communist sympathizer but on the information before us he would appear to be no more than a 'progressive', or radical."

The BBC quotes Ed Hampshire, from the National Archives, as saying that Washington and London were looking for different things in Chaplin's background: