She always carries her father’s legacy with her, whether she wants it or not. What’s more, she wears it on her face. Geraldine Chaplin looks like Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977). This resemblance has only grown stronger over the years. On July 31, Geraldine Chaplin will be 80 years old.
A heavy mortgage?
She has the same smile, the same sad eyes. It’s not a trick, it’s innate. A heavy burden? To look like the greatest actor of all time when you’re an actress yourself and even bear his name?
When asked this question, the daughter laughs and answers calmly: “Other people inherit wealth or a title. I inherited a surname. Because of my name, the right doors opened.” She used the name “as often as I could and exploited it,” which in this case was more of a blessing than a burden.
Regardless, she has appeared in more films than her legendary father, who made 80 in his lifetime. In her case, it was around 100, the last in 2023 alongside John Malkovich (70): “Seneca – Or: On the Birth of Earthquakes”.
Her name has been one of the most important in her field for decades, she has delighted audiences and critics in films such as “Doctor Zhivago”, “Raising Ravens”, “You Will Still Think of Me”, “Mother Teresa: In the Name of the Poor of God”, “Berezina or the Last Days of Switzerland”, “The Wolfman”, “The Orphanage” and “Talk to Her”. But in everything she does and achieves, the monumental name of her father is always in the background.
She is the eldest of eight children
After three marriages and three children, he married Oona O’Neill (1925-1991), daughter of the US playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), in 1943. She was 18, he was 54. Their daughter Geraldine was born in 1944, and seven more children followed. They all had to experience at an early age that their father’s fame had a political downside.
Charlie Chaplin was originally a London actor who first came to the USA in 1910. He never gave up his British citizenship during his life, although he had his greatest successes in America. His most famous role was that of the Tramp, which made him the most famous star in the silent film era of the 1920s.
Chaplin was a brilliant actor and director. But the socially critical undertones of his films were frowned upon in some political circles in the USA. When his first sound film, “The Great Dictator”, was released in 1940, the US censorship authorities saw it not only as a satirical parody of German fascism, but also as a criticism of militarism and the US state power. They initially refused to approve the film, which was a great success.
The USA banned its biggest star
After the end of the war, the liberal pacifist Chaplin was persecuted primarily by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), who accused him of “communist” and “un-American activities” and wanted to revoke his residency permit.
In 1952, Hoover was successful and America banished its biggest star: Charlie Chaplin and his family were travelling to England for the world premiere of his tragicomedy “Limelight” when he was informed on the high seas that the US Department of Justice had spoken out against his return to the USA. The Chaplins moved to Switzerland when Geraldine was eight years old. She was enrolled in a boarding school where she learned to speak fluent French and Spanish.
“A good, but also a very strict father”
In an interview with the “Welt” newspaper, his daughter described him: “He was a good father, but also a very strict one. You must not forget that he was born in 1889, he was still very Victorian. The nice thing was that he was often there. He worked a lot at home. But that also meant that we were only allowed to move on tiptoe and had to be as quiet as a mouse. If we wanted to play, we had to go outside.”
He placed great value on discipline. “If we didn’t do well at school, we were severely punished. He couldn’t forbid us from watching TV, that didn’t exist yet. But we were under house arrest. And whatever we wanted, we weren’t allowed to do. But I have no comparison; I only had one father. And I was happy because he was the most famous, the most popular man in the world.”
A man who could also be very exuberant in private: “He was really very funny with his children, actually whenever he had an audience he was great. Sometimes I wondered if that was why he had so many children, so he could have a big audience.”
This brilliant film star was horrified when he first heard of Geraldine’s desire to become an actress. “He always wanted his children to learn something decent. They should become doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, just not actors.”
With “Doctor Zhivago” everything changed
As a girl, Geraldine initially had the idea of becoming a ballet dancer. She trained at the Royal Ballet School in London, but, as she later said, she lacked the talent to be a prima ballerina. So she became an actress.
She made the first film with the then world star Jean Paul Belmondo (1933-2021). The second film became a world classic; in “Doctor Zhivago” she played a leading role, the Russian doctor’s wife Tonya. From then on, her father was also her fan, as she said.
As a child, she had already worked with Charlie Chaplin in 1952 in “Limelight”. “It was only half a day,” she said in an interview with “Welt”. “My brother, my sister and I were happy that we had a day off school. We were allowed to play street children, which was great fun.”
In 1967 she appeared in Charlie Chaplin’s last film, “The Countess from Hong Kong”, her father was the director. “He was a total perfectionist, very demanding and obsessive. If something didn’t work out, he could go wild. The way he directed was incredible. He played the role, played Sophia Loren and was more Sophia Loren than she could ever be.”
Honorary Oscar for Charlie Chaplin
Geraldine never received an Oscar for her acting performances. But she accompanied her father to the USA in 1972 when Charlie Chaplin received an honorary Oscar for his “invaluable services to the art of film”. “They only gave him a visa for ten days, we couldn’t believe it… He said happily: ‘The Americans are still afraid of me'”, she remembers. That evening the audience applauded the great Chaplin for 12 minutes – a record that remains to this day.
Charlie Chaplin died in Switzerland in 1977 at the age of 88. He did not live to see Geraldine’s wedding to the Chilean cameraman Patricio Castilla in 2006, nor the birth of their daughter in 1986, who was called Oona, like Chaplin’s fourth wife. She also became an actress.
Geraldine Chaplin, who had a brilliant career in Europe and worked with great filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Franco Zeffirelli and Carlos Saura, with whom she also had her son Shane, complained again and again that hardly any director in the USA was interested in her except Robert Altman and his student Alan Rudolph: “I have no offers in this country, none. Not even an interesting script to read. The only people who ever ask me are Altman and Rudolph.” Has the daughter inherited the same spell from her incomparable father?
