The Kid: Geraldine Chaplin in the sixties

Geraldine Chaplin emerged as a film star in the 1960s upon her highly publicized appearance in David Lean’s epic film Doctor Zhivago (1965). Accompanying her presence in Lean’s film was public discourse, throughout the United States and Europe, which often framed her as a kind of cosmopolitan hybrid figure. In this journalistic commentary, Chaplin was always split in half between one identity and another: half-British and half-American; half-demure, half-hippie; one part her mother, Oona O’Neill, and one part her father, Charlie Chaplin. Much of this commentary was, indeed, quite cynical in its character, questioning her acting ability in its repeated suggestion that her winning of film roles was solely due to her famous last name. Many of the films she made during this period, in particular the French film Crime on a Summer Morning (released before Zhivago, in 1965) and the British film Cop Out (made shortly after Zhivago and released in 1967) reflect this ambivalence about her talent and distinction, through her small parts as privileged and rather unlikeable rich girls clashing with their wealthy, sympathetic fathers. Her performance in Lean’s film, and others in the 1960s, will be examined alongside privileged moments from her father’s films, including The Kid, and also in relation to the reception of Charlie Chaplin’s films from the Soviet Union after the time period in which Doctor Zhivago is set.

Modern Times: Geraldine Chaplin across contemporary cinema

In the biopic Chaplin (1992), Geraldine Chaplin plays her own grandmother. This is the role that, in owing perhaps to the novelty of a film star playing her own relation, is perhaps the most widely seen of Geraldine Chaplin’s performances. And it reminds us that like her father, Geraldine, although perhaps mostly remembered by film enthusiasts for her work in films by Carlos Saura, Jacques Rivette, and Robert Altman, has spent much of her career negotiating the rather less sympathetic strictures of the commercial film industry. Where much of the book up to this point focuses on Geraldine Chaplin’s presence in various national and transnational art cinemas, this final chapter deepens our sense of her screen persona by looking at several of her most important films made outside of the context of the earlier chapters. Using the motif of the close-up as a point of departure, the film analyses Chaplin’s contemporary performances for numerous directors, including Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Birkin, Guy Maddin, Richard Lester, and more.

A Woman of Paris: Geraldine Chaplin across French cinema

Charlie Chaplin was a major figure in postwar film criticism, particularly in France, where critical luminaries such as André Bazin, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette all wrote on his work. Early in her career, Geraldine Chaplin inherited her father’s Parisian legacy, in both discourse on her public life in France (where she lived and worked early in her career) and also across a number of French films in which she played a central role. This chapter examines Geraldine’s work in France for filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Michel Deville in the context of French film culture’s fascination with her father, showing how Geraldine herself intervened in and redirected this critical legacy through her own performances.

The Circus: Geraldine Chaplin in the cinemas of Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph

In many of her American films, Geraldine Chaplin is figured in self-reflexive stories about stardom and self-image, particularly in the films directed by Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph in the 1970s and 1980s: Altman’s Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and A Wedding (1978); and Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. (1976), Remember My Name (1978), and The Moderns (1988). In these films, as discussed in this chapter, Chaplin develops a distinctive presence, tapping into her already established persona from the 1960s but in now frequently ironic and self-reflexive ways. Perhaps the best example of this intriguing development in her persona is Chaplin’s role as Opal in Altman’s Nashville, its massive ensemble cast suggestive of a kind of performative circus. Opal, this chapter argues, is a thoroughly ironic variation of the kind of privileged character Chaplin played in some of her 1960s films.

Into the limelight

Geraldine Chaplin’s first appearance as an actor in cinema was in a brief role in her father’s 1952 film Limelight. This chapter begins with a discussion of that moment, and from there discusses the relationship between Charlie Chaplin’s celebrity and style as an actor with Geraldine’s own emergence as an actor and a star. The introduction then provides an overview of the career that will be analysed and discussed in the pages to follow.

The Great Dictator: Geraldine Chaplin in the films of Carlos Saura

As the first chapter of this book demonstrates, moviegoers mainly knew Geraldine Chaplin in the 1960s as the daughter of cinema’s most famous silent clown. Nevertheless, the expansive, transnational character of her career is already in evidence in the international assortment of films she made during that decade (in Italy, Britain, and France.). The transnational quality of her persona is also important to an understanding to the work discussed in this chapter, the films she made with Spanish auteur Carlos Saura between 1967 and 1979. In these films with Saura, who was also Chaplin’s partner during this period, Chaplin creatively intervenes in the politics and cinema of Spain during the final years of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, whose repressive cruelties are dealt with both explicitly and implicitly in Saura’s films. Chaplin’s performances in Saura’s films, the chapter argues, creatively intervene in traditional understandings of womanhood in Franco’s Spain, all the while demonstrating a fervent commitment to use performance as a vehicle for liberation.