Biography

Rafael Padilla was born sometime 1865 in Cuba, in Havana, without a surname. According to historian Gérard Noiriel, "Padilla" may have the matronymic of his former Spanish master's wife. His parents were slaves in a Cuban plantation from which they escaped in 1878, leaving their son to a poor black woman who raised him in the slums of Havana. When Rafael was still a boy, she sold him to a Spanish businessman named Patricio Castaño Capetillo for 18 ounces of gold. Castaño brought Rafael to his family's household in the village of Sopuerta in northern Spain. Cuba had banned the slave trade in 1862, and under international law Rafael technically ceased to be a slave at all the moment he set foot on European soil, but nonetheless the Castaños treated him like one. At around the age of 14 or 15, Rafael fled the Castaños and worked in the quarries of the Basque Country, then moved to Bilbao where he worked odd jobs. There he met Tony Grice, a travelling English clown, who hired him as an assistant and domestic servant. Grice would occasionally incorporate Rafael into his acts, such as in his parodies of American minstrel shows. The new duo would go on to public notoriety when they began performing with the Nouveau Cirque of Joseph Oller in Paris during October 1886. Rafael's stage name of Chocolat was given to him at this time by Grice. In 1888, their partnership was ended when Henri Agoust, the manager of the Nouveau Cirque, hired Chocolat as the star of a nautical pantomime. He saw Chocolat as a potential star dancer and mime, and was proven correct when his first show, "The Wedding of Chocolat" was a huge success. In 1895, Raoul Donval, director of the Nouveau Cirque, formed a new duo, teaming Chocolat with a British clown, George Foottit. The two performed together for twenty years, popularizing clown comedy, especially with the burlesque sketch William Tell. Their joint career reached its peak until they were considered old fashioned with the arrival of a generation of American black artists bringing the cake walk to the stages of Europe. Foottit and Chocolat split up in 1910, when Andre Antoine, director of the Odeon, hired Foottit to play the role of the Clown in Romeo and Juliet. In 1911 he performed at the Cirque de Paris in the Revue burlesque, and in 1912 Tablette et Chocolat with his adoptive son Eugène Grimaldi, but he suffered a breakdown after the death of his 19 year old daughter caused by tuberculosis. Padilla died on 4 November 1917 during a tour of the Cirque Raincy in Bordeaux. His body rests at the Protestant cemetery in Bordeaux.
- IMDb mini biography by: Daniel R.