Oona O'Neill
Encyclopedia
Oona, Lady Chaplin (May 14, 1925 – September 27, 1991) was the daughter of Nobel
and Pulitzer Prize
-winning playwright
Eugene O'Neill
and writer Agnes Boulton
, and the wife of British actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin
.
Oona was born while her parents were living in Bermuda
, during a period of heavy drinking by Eugene O'Neill. She was two years old when he left the family for actress Carlotta Monterey who became his third wife. Oona and her brother Shane (born in 1919) rarely saw him afterward.
Oona spent her summers in the Boulton family's rambling Victorian house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey
; the rest of the year she lived in Manhattan with her mother, where she attended the Brearley School
. In 1942, seventeen-year-old Oona was named "Debutante of the Year." When asked by a reporter whether she considered herself "lace curtain" Irish or "shanty" Irish, she replied, "Shanty Irish!" Deciding to pursue an acting career instead of attending Vassar College
, she got a part in a stock company stage production of Pal Joey and formed close friendships with Carol Grace Saroyan
and Gloria Vanderbilt
, later chronicled by Aram Saroyan
in the book Trio: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship.
Oona dated cartoonist Peter Arno
, director Orson Welles
, and author J. D. Salinger
. To Salinger's disappointment, however, their relationship ended when she met Charlie Chaplin
, after having been suggested to him for a part in one of his films. Despite the 36-year age difference, Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that he was instantly smitten by Oona's "luminous beauty and sequestered charm."
Eugene O'Neill was outraged at the news of his daughter's affair with Chaplin and refused to give his consent so that she could marry him before her eighteenth birthday. After their marriage in June 1943, he cut Oona out of his life, refusing her attempts at a reconciliation. According to her biographer Jane Scovell, playwright Clifford Odets
"saw something vindictive in O'Neill's behaviour and thought that O'Neill could not forgive Oona perhaps because he had abandoned her." Her half-brother, Eugene O'Neill, Jr.
, was the son of O'Neill's first wife, Kathleen Jenkins; the younger O'Neill later suffered from alcoholism and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40. Oona's brother Shane became a heroin addict and moved into the family home in Bermuda, Spithead, with his new wife, where he supported himself by selling off the furnishings. He was disowned by his father before also committing suicide (by jumping out of a window) a number of years later.
When Oona saw Jack Nicholson
in the 1981 film Reds, where he portrayed her estranged father, she wrote him a letter saying "Thanks to you, I now can love my father". Nicholson has said that "that is the best compliment I ever got".
While attending the London premiere of his film Limelight in September 1952, Chaplin was accused of "Communist sympathies" and denied re-entry into the United States. Because of the tax laws in England, the family (which by then included four children), chose to relocate to Switzerland. Oona returned to the United States by herself to close their California house and to surreptitiously collect all Chaplin's assets from safe deposit box
es, even as the FBI was questioning the members of their staff. She later admitted to sewing $1,000 bills into the lining of her mink coat, thereby saving the Chaplin fortune. Oona renounced her American citizenship shortly after returning to Europe. She and Chaplin settled permanently with their family in Vevey
, Switzerland, where they spent the majority of their thirty-five year marriage, visited by Hollywood friends.
Chaplin and Oona maintained a close relationship for 35 years and had eight children together. It was by all accounts a happy marriage despite the age difference.
She was also the second stepmother (after Paulette Goddard
) to Charles Chaplin, Jr.
(1925–1968) and Sydney Chaplin (1926–2009). Their mother was Lita Grey
(1908–1995).
Geraldine thought very highly of her mother, and when she was cast in Doctor Zhivago
(1965), she decided to base her performance as the title character's wife on her mother, whom she described as "a woman who was willing to give her life to an artist."
In 2006, Chaplin's granddaughter, model and actress Kiera Chaplin
(daughter of Eugene Chaplin), visited Tao House, where her maternal great-grandfather lived. She has announced that she would like to play her grandmother in a film. The same year, daughter Jane Chaplin announced that she had written a memoir entitled "Seventeen Minutes with my Father," which she said would not be easy on her mother.
Oona was a fan of Arsenal Football Club
(the club that Charlie had supported all his life) and described their 1989 League Championship victory as 'One of the greatest moments of my life.'
In March 1975, three years after briefly returning to the United States to receive a special Academy Award, Charlie Chaplin was knighted. His health declined rapidly afterward, however, and he died on Christmas Day 1977 at the age of eighty-eight.
Following Chaplin's death, Oona moved to New York where she attempted to build a life on her own. She retreated to the manor in Switzerland where she became a recluse, and struggled with alcoholism. She ultimately died of pancreatic cancer
on September 27, 1991, in Corsier-sur-Vevey
, Switzerland
.
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
and Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
-winning playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
and writer Agnes Boulton
Agnes Boulton
Agnes Boulton was a successful "pulp fiction" writer in the 1910s, later the wife of Eugene O'Neill. Prior to their marriage, she wrote for such magazines as Breezy Stories, Snappy Stories, and Young's Magazine. Boulton was born in 1892 in England, the daughter of Cecil and Edward W...
, and the wife of British actor, director and producer Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
.
Oona was born while her parents were living in Bermuda
Bermuda
Bermuda is a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located off the east coast of the United States, its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, about to the west-northwest. It is about south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and northeast of Miami, Florida...
, during a period of heavy drinking by Eugene O'Neill. She was two years old when he left the family for actress Carlotta Monterey who became his third wife. Oona and her brother Shane (born in 1919) rarely saw him afterward.
Oona spent her summers in the Boulton family's rambling Victorian house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey
Point Pleasant, New Jersey
Point Pleasant is a Borough in Ocean County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough population was 18,392...
; the rest of the year she lived in Manhattan with her mother, where she attended the Brearley School
Brearley School
The Brearley School is an all-girls private school in New York City, New York, United States. It is located on the Upper East Side of the Manhattan borough of New York City. The school is divided into the Lower School , Middle School and Upper School...
. In 1942, seventeen-year-old Oona was named "Debutante of the Year." When asked by a reporter whether she considered herself "lace curtain" Irish or "shanty" Irish, she replied, "Shanty Irish!" Deciding to pursue an acting career instead of attending Vassar College
Vassar College
Vassar College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the United States. The Vassar campus comprises over and more than 100 buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International,...
, she got a part in a stock company stage production of Pal Joey and formed close friendships with Carol Grace Saroyan
Carol Grace
Carol Grace was an American actress and author. She is usually referred to as Carol Marcus Saroyan or Carol Matthau....
and Gloria Vanderbilt
Gloria Vanderbilt
Gloria Laura Vanderbilt is an American artist, author, actress, heiress, and socialite most noted as an early developer of designer blue jeans...
, later chronicled by Aram Saroyan
Aram Saroyan
Aram Saroyan is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. There has been a resurgence of interest in his work in the 21st century, evidenced by the publication in 2007 of several previous collections reissued together as Complete Minimal Poems.- Biography :Saroyan was born...
in the book Trio: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship.
Oona dated cartoonist Peter Arno
Peter Arno
Peter Arno was a U.S. cartoonist.-Biography:Born Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr. in New York, New York, and educated at the Hotchkiss School and Yale University, his cartoons were published in The New Yorker from 1925–1968. They often depicted a cross-section of New York society from the 1920s through...
, director Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
, and author J. D. Salinger
J. D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980....
. To Salinger's disappointment, however, their relationship ended when she met Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
, after having been suggested to him for a part in one of his films. Despite the 36-year age difference, Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that he was instantly smitten by Oona's "luminous beauty and sequestered charm."
Eugene O'Neill was outraged at the news of his daughter's affair with Chaplin and refused to give his consent so that she could marry him before her eighteenth birthday. After their marriage in June 1943, he cut Oona out of his life, refusing her attempts at a reconciliation. According to her biographer Jane Scovell, playwright Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...
"saw something vindictive in O'Neill's behaviour and thought that O'Neill could not forgive Oona perhaps because he had abandoned her." Her half-brother, Eugene O'Neill, Jr.
Eugene O'Neill, Jr.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, Jr. was an American professor of Greek literature.O'Neill was son of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill and the elder O'Neill's first wife, Kathleen Jenkins. The couple divorced in 1912. O'Neill once said he did not even meet his father until age 12...
, was the son of O'Neill's first wife, Kathleen Jenkins; the younger O'Neill later suffered from alcoholism and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40. Oona's brother Shane became a heroin addict and moved into the family home in Bermuda, Spithead, with his new wife, where he supported himself by selling off the furnishings. He was disowned by his father before also committing suicide (by jumping out of a window) a number of years later.
When Oona saw Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...
in the 1981 film Reds, where he portrayed her estranged father, she wrote him a letter saying "Thanks to you, I now can love my father". Nicholson has said that "that is the best compliment I ever got".
While attending the London premiere of his film Limelight in September 1952, Chaplin was accused of "Communist sympathies" and denied re-entry into the United States. Because of the tax laws in England, the family (which by then included four children), chose to relocate to Switzerland. Oona returned to the United States by herself to close their California house and to surreptitiously collect all Chaplin's assets from safe deposit box
Safe deposit box
A safe deposit box or wrongly referred to as a safety deposit box is an individually-secured container, usually held within a larger safe or bank vault. Safe deposit boxes are generally located in banks, post offices or other institutions...
es, even as the FBI was questioning the members of their staff. She later admitted to sewing $1,000 bills into the lining of her mink coat, thereby saving the Chaplin fortune. Oona renounced her American citizenship shortly after returning to Europe. She and Chaplin settled permanently with their family in Vevey
Vevey
Vevey is a town in Switzerland in the canton Vaud, on the north shore of Lake Geneva, near Lausanne.It was the seat of the district of the same name until 2006, and is now part of the Riviera-Pays-d'Enhaut District...
, Switzerland, where they spent the majority of their thirty-five year marriage, visited by Hollywood friends.
Chaplin and Oona maintained a close relationship for 35 years and had eight children together. It was by all accounts a happy marriage despite the age difference.
Family
Charlie Chaplin and Oona had eight children together and they include:- Actress GeraldineGeraldine ChaplinGeraldine Leigh Chaplin is an English-American actress and the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.Chaplin first came to prominence for her Golden Globe-nominated role of Tonya in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago . She received her second Golden Globe nomination for Robert Altman's Nashville...
(b. July 31, 1944, longtime partner to Spanish film director Carlos SauraCarlos SauraCarlos Saura Atarés is a Spanish film director and photographer.-Early life:Born into a family of artists , he developed his artistic sense in childhood as a photography enthusiast.He obtained his directing diploma in Madrid in 1957 at the Institute of Cinema Research and Studies...
) - Michael (b. March 7, 1946)
- JosephineJosephine ChaplinJosephine Hannah Chaplin is an actress and the daughter of actor/comedian/director Charlie Chaplin and his last wife, Oona O'Neill. Her siblings include Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Chaplin and Michael Chaplin. She was also half-sister to Sydney Chaplin, Charles Chaplin, Jr...
(b. March 28, 1949, mother of Julien Ronet (b. 1980) by Maurice Ronet) - VictoriaVictoria ChaplinVictoria Chaplin is an Anglo-American actress, the daughter of actor/comedian Charlie Chaplin and Oona O'Neill Chaplin, and the granddaughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill....
(b. May 19, 1951, married to Jean-Baptiste Thieree, parents of Aurelie and James (b. May 2, 1974, in Lausanne)) - EugeneEugene ChaplinEugene Chaplin is a Swiss recording engineer and documentary filmmaker. He is the president of the International Comedy Film Festival of Vevey, Switzerland...
(b. August 23, 1953) - Jane (b. May 23, 1957, unmarried)
- Annette (b. December 3, 1959, unmarried)
- ChristopherChristopher ChaplinChristopher James Chaplin is a composer and actor who appeared in the film Total Eclipse as the character Charles Cros, as well as in other roles. However, he is best known for being the youngest son of Charlie Chaplin and Oona O'Neill...
(b. July 6, 1962, unmarried)
She was also the second stepmother (after Paulette Goddard
Paulette Goddard
Paulette Goddard was an American film and theatre actress. A former child fashion model and in several Broadway productions as Ziegfeld Girl, she was a major star of the Paramount Studio in the 1940s. She was married to several notable men, including Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Erich...
) to Charles Chaplin, Jr.
Charles Chaplin, Jr.
Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. was an American actor and the son of Charlie Chaplin.Chaplin was born in Beverly Hills, California. His mother was Charlie Chaplin's second wife, Mexican-American Lita Grey, and he was the elder brother of actor Sydney Chaplin...
(1925–1968) and Sydney Chaplin (1926–2009). Their mother was Lita Grey
Lita Grey
Lita Grey was an American actress and the second wife of Charlie Chaplin. She was born in Hollywood, California, in 1908, to a Mexican-born mother and a father of Irish heritage and christened Lillita Louise MacMurray.-Personal life:Grey married four times...
(1908–1995).
Geraldine thought very highly of her mother, and when she was cast in Doctor Zhivago
Doctor Zhivago (1965 film)
Doctor Zhivago is a 1965 epic drama-romance-war film directed by David Lean and loosely based on the famous novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak...
(1965), she decided to base her performance as the title character's wife on her mother, whom she described as "a woman who was willing to give her life to an artist."
In 2006, Chaplin's granddaughter, model and actress Kiera Chaplin
Kiera Chaplin
Kiera Chaplin is a Northern Irish-born British actress and model, a granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin and a great-granddaughter of Eugene O'Neill.-Biography:...
(daughter of Eugene Chaplin), visited Tao House, where her maternal great-grandfather lived. She has announced that she would like to play her grandmother in a film. The same year, daughter Jane Chaplin announced that she had written a memoir entitled "Seventeen Minutes with my Father," which she said would not be easy on her mother.
Oona was a fan of Arsenal Football Club
Arsenal F.C.
Arsenal Football Club is a professional English Premier League football club based in North London. One of the most successful clubs in English football, it has won 13 First Division and Premier League titles and 10 FA Cups...
(the club that Charlie had supported all his life) and described their 1989 League Championship victory as 'One of the greatest moments of my life.'
In March 1975, three years after briefly returning to the United States to receive a special Academy Award, Charlie Chaplin was knighted. His health declined rapidly afterward, however, and he died on Christmas Day 1977 at the age of eighty-eight.
Following Chaplin's death, Oona moved to New York where she attempted to build a life on her own. She retreated to the manor in Switzerland where she became a recluse, and struggled with alcoholism. She ultimately died of pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer refers to a malignant neoplasm of the pancreas. The most common type of pancreatic cancer, accounting for 95% of these tumors is adenocarcinoma, which arises within the exocrine component of the pancreas. A minority arises from the islet cells and is classified as a...
on September 27, 1991, in Corsier-sur-Vevey
Corsier-sur-Vevey
Corsier-sur-Vevey is a municipality in the district of Riviera-Pays-d'Enhaut in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland.-History:Corsier-sur-Vevey is first mentioned in 1079 as Corise. Until 1953 it was known as Corsier.-Geography:...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
.