She was born in Hollywood, California and christened Lillita Louise MacMurray. Her father was of Scottish descent and her mother"s family was descended from an illustrious 9th-generation Californian Spanish family, whose luminaries included Antonio Maria Lugo.
The Lugos were from Andalucia, Spain and were one of the first to bring horses to the country. Misinformation persists to this day that her family was of Mexican descent, despite her family history being well-documented. The marriage was troubled from the start.
The two had few interests in common, and Chaplin spent as much time as he could away from home, working on The Gold Rush (in which Grey was to have played the female lead) and later The Circus.
They divorced on August 22, 1927, due to his alleged numerous affairs with other women, and he was ordered to pay over United States$600,000 and United States$100,000 in trust for each child. lieutenant was the largest divorce settlement at the time.
The divorce was one of the sensational media events of the time. Copies of her lengthy divorce complaint which made scandalous sexual claims against Chaplin were published and publicly sold.
According to the 1940 United States Census, Lita and Arthur lived at 38 East 50th Street, in New York City, New York, and that in 1935, she had lived in England.
In the 1970s and 1980s she worked as a clerk at Robinson"s Department Store in Beverly Hills. She wrote two autobiographical volumes covering her life with Chaplin. My Life With Chaplin (1966) was by her own admission largely a work of exaggeration and fabrication.
She claimed to tell the story as it really was in her second memoir Wife of the Life of the Party (1995).
Grey was portrayed by Deborah Moore in the 1992 film Chaplin, though Grey was depicted on screen for less than a minute in the final film. Kenneth Anger devoted a colorful chapter to Lita Grey in his 1959 book Hollywood Babylon.
She died in Los Angeles, at age 87 of cancer, and was buried in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, California.
