Geraldine CHAPLIN, American actress. My Name, A Wedding 1978, The Mirror Crack'd 1980, Voyage en Douce 1981, Bolero 1982, Corsican Brothers, The Word, L’Amour Par Terre, White Mischief 1988, The Modems 1988.
Background
Geraldine Chaplin was born on 3 July 1944 Santa Monica, California, United States. Daughter of Charles Chaplin and Oona (O’Neill) Chaplin. In The father’s place in film history is automatic, but there are those who found his personality hard to receive. Yet to criticize Charlie Chaplin amounts, in some quarters, to an unforgivable heresy that marks one down as the baleful, inhuman, and antilife anti-Charlie.
The first child of Chaplin’s happy, last marriage to Oona, daughter of that implacably tragic playwright Eugene O’Neill.
Education
Private schools. Royal Ballet School, London, United Kingdom.
Career
This European actress is too little appreciated in America, thanks in part to the verv different, garrulous cuckoo Robert Altman created in Nashville (75), where Chaplin gave herself to Opal from the BBC as generously as she aided Saura’s film. Of course, Carlos Saura was her lover and may be expected to see and know an inner person. Whereas Altmans gallerv pictures are more concerned with the oddities of first impression. But it is just as likely that the actress herself is creatively divided. Her own history of London, Beverly Hills, Geneva, and Madrid may be the surface turmoil of remarkable pedigree. It’s easy to see Chaplin’s dark romanticism in Geraldine’s face; but listen as well for the echo of Anna Christie and Long Day’s Journey into Night.
She was a ballet student as a child, and it is likely that her lessons inspired part of her father’s Limelight as well as the debut of Claire Bloom, a woman with O’Neill looks. Geraldine made her first film in 1964, and since then she has worked hard in a variety of countries and languages: Par nn Bean Matin d'Eté (64, Jacques Deray); an introduction to Madrid in Doctor Zhivago (65, David Lean); Peppermint Frappé (67, Saura); Stranger in the House (67, Pierre Rouve); Stress es Tres. Tres (68, Saura); / Killed Rasputin (68, Robert Hossein); La Madriguera (69, Saura); The Hawaiians (70. Tom Cries); Zero Population Control (71, Michael Campus); Ana y los Lobos (72, Saura); Innocent Bystanders (72, Peter Collinson); as Anne of Austria, overshadowed by Dunaway and Raquel Welch in The Three Musketeers (The Queen's Diamonds) (73, Richard Lester) and The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady) (74. Lester); Noroit (75, Jacques Rivette); Annie Oakley in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (76, Altman); bemused and wandering in Welcome to L A (76, Alan Rudolph); a classic victim in Roseland (77, James Ivory); Bríef Letter Long Farewell (77. Herbert Vessely); Un Page d'Amour (77, Maurice Rabinowicz); Elisa, Vida Mia (77, Saura); the distraught mistress of ceremonies in A Wedding (78, Altman); brilliant as the woman out of prison in Remember My Name (78, Rudolph); and LAdoption (78, Marc Grunebaum).
Older, gaunt sometimes, yet oddly childlike, she remained capable of indelible moments: Mama Cumple 100 Anos (79, Saura); Le Voyage en Douce (79, Michel Deville); The Mirror Crack'd (SO, Guy Hamilton); Les Uns et les Autres (81, Claude Lelouch); La Vie est un Roman (83, Alain Resnais); LAmour par Terre (84, Rivette); The Corsican Brothers (85, Ian Sharp); White Mischief (87, Michael Radford); superb as the vain collector in The Moderns (88, Rudolph); Return of the Musketeers (89, Lester); Je Veux Rentre a la Maison (89, Resnais); The Children (90, Tony Palmer); as her own deranged grandmother in Chaplin (92, Richard Attenborough), the one reason for seeing that picture; The Age of Innocence (93, Martin Scorsese); and Words Upon the Window Pane (94, Mary McGuekian).
By the mid-nineties, she was working a lot in Europe or in films of a religious nature: Home for the Holidays (95, Jodie Foster); Para Recibir el Canto de los Pájaros (95, Jorge Sanjiner); Gulliver's Travels (96, Charles Sturridge); Jane Eyre (96, Franco Zeffirelli); Os Olhos da Asia (96, Joao Mario Grilo); Chmetime (96, George Sluizer); The Odyssey (97, Andrei Konchalovsky); the lead in Mother Teresa: In the Name of God’s Poor (97, Kevin Connor); Cousin Bette (98, Des McAnuff); Finisterre, Donde Termina el Mundo (98, Xavier Yillaverde); To Walk with Lions (99, Carl Schultz); Beresina (99, Daniel Schmid); Many, Mother of Jesus (99, Connor); Tu Que Harias por Amor (99, Carlos Saura Medrano—the son of Carlos Saura); In the Beginning (00, Connor); Hable con Ella (02, Pedro Almodovar).
Membership
My Name, A Wedding 1978, The Mirror Crack'd 1980, Voyage en Douce 1981, Bolero 1982, Corsican Brothers, The Word, L’Amour Par Terre, White Mischief 1988, The Modems 1988.
Personality
Geraldine’s eloquent features are like a territory helpless against invasion. In Cria. she is especially touching in that she seems to have been devastated by feelings that cannot be fobbed off or acted out. She has the natural face of vulnerability: the same resolute stare belonged to Lillian Gish, the young Anna Karina, and to Ana Torrent, her other self in the magnificent Cria.