Friday, July 28, Anna Pukas


Charlie’s legacy to showbusiness has produced a new generation of Chaplins.OVER here we have the Redgraves and the Foxes while over there they have the Fondas and the Hustons. But the showbusiness dynasty that straddles both sides of the Atlantic is surely the one that bears the name Chaplin. Charlie the patriarch needs no introduction. One of the first truly global superstars, no less a personage than George Bernard Shaw described him as “the only genius to come out of the film industry”.

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Lita Grey was also 16 when Chaplin, then 35, began an affair with her. She was cast as the female lead in The Gold Rush but had to pull out when she fell pregnant soon after her wedding to Chaplin in November 1924. The marriage, which produced two sons, Charles and Sydney, was a disaster and the divorce three years later acrimonious. Lita won a record- breaking settlement of $825,000 and almost $1million in costs. According to one Chaplin biographer, Joyce Milton, the marriage was the inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.