The Chaplins' next chapter

This is the year that a black and white film with a single line of dialogue went from being a Cannes favourite to winning five Oscars.

For the new generation of the Chaplin family, Dolores and Carmen, granddaughters of Charlie, it’s heartening to see his style of film-making being celebrated and they didn’t take much persuading to host the film’s premieres in London and LA. At The Weinstein Company’s party the night before the Oscars they were guests of honour. ‘You don’t need 3D or crazy colours to make a good film,’ says Dolores, with the faintest trace of a French accent. ‘I don’t think it’s nostalgia. Things come back, like in fashion, so it’s a little return, going back to the roots of how films were once made. All you need is a good script, great actors and a fantastic director.’ It’s 40 years since Charlie Chaplin belatedly won a Lifetime Achievement Oscar; enduring affection for his work is one reason Hollywood has been so receptive to The Artist, an homage to the days before talkies.

Dolores Chaplin, an actress, and Carmen, who writes and would like to direct, are the daughters of Chaplin’s eldest surviving son, Michael, who acted alongside his father in Limelight and A King in New York, before going, as Dolores puts it, on a ‘totally different journey’. The sisters describe a hippieish upbringing – Michael chose to bring up his family on a farm in southwest France. Their mother Patricia modelled before becoming a painter. They were sent to boarding school in Madrid, so both girls speak English, French and Spanish. As children, the girls regularly put on plays and made their own films. Dolores, dressed when we meet in Paris in head-to-toe couture ahead of attending the Dior show, is so elegant that it’s hard to imagine her on a farm; Carmen, who happily switches from towering heels into Ugg boots, is planning a move from New York to London, which she thinks will be a better home for her style of film-making than LA.

Would they ever have considered doing anything else? Dolores, next to be seen opposite Gérard Depardieu in the new Astérix et Obélix film and the 1960s drama Après mai, says, ‘Like any family – families of doctors, families of lawyers – what you grow up with is something that might inspire you, or it might make you go in the opposite direction, like my father.’ Their father advised them against acting, but ‘he didn’t tell us not to do it,’ says Carmen. Their surname hasn’t always thrilled their peers: ‘Film is such a competitive thing,’ she continues. ‘When you’re an actress there’s always going to be people who say, “Oh, she slept with the director.” There’s a lot of genuine love and heart but there’s a lot of the other things, too.’

Carmen is refreshingly frank, admitting that despite working with people such as Wim Wenders, Julie Christie and Ewan McGregor, she has also acted in ‘a lot of bad movies’. She has just written and directed her first short movie, Tryst in Paname, in which Dolores appears, and is working on her first full-length feature, Bombay Nights. ‘Acting is great but the roles I was getting were quite boring so I started to write with the idea of creating screenplays for myself, thinking about parts I would love to play.’ In this she is much like her grandfather, who wrote, directed and produced his films, as well as starring in them.

‘When I was growing up, the image of the actor was more my aunt Geraldine. My grandfather was part of the scenery. It was only when I went to acting school that I discovered the extent of his genius and who the man was,’ says Dolores. Geraldine’s career began in Charlie’s film Limelight and she went on to appear in Dr Zhivago, White Mischief and Richard Attenborough’s 1992 biopic Chaplin, starring Robert Downey Jr as the silent star, in which she played her own grandmother, Hannah. As well as being celebrated for her work with directors from David Lean to Robert Altman, Geraldine has also forged a career as a star of European cinema, including the Almodovar classic Talk to Her.

When his mother became ill and was committed to a mental asylum, Charlie, aged seven, was briefly sent to a workhouse and then to a draconian free school for the children of paupers. As a young and wealthy star in 1921, he brought his mother to California, but she never made a full return to health and died in 1928. This experience of suffering and abject poverty in Kennington (where there’s still a plaque marking his address) helped Chaplin to relate to some of the bleaker films he starred in and he never tempered his compassion for the marginalised. In the 1930s his colourful love life made him easy quarry for the US government who accused him of ‘un-American’ activities and after a visit to Europe in 1952, at the height of McCarthyism, his re-entry permit was revoked on the orders of J Edgar Hoover. He didn’t return until 1972 when he accepted his Academy Award, a rare moment of genuinely powerful emotion in Oscar history.

Throughout Chaplin’s life his fondness for very young starlets was often the cause of calamity. After three disastrous marriages, four children (the first, Norman – ‘The Little Mouse’, died a few days after he was born) and innumerable affairs, in 1943 he fell in love, aged 54, for the final time, with 18-year-old Oona O’Neill (Carmen and Dolores’ grandmother). The couple stayed together until his death in 1977, and had eight children – the youngest, Christopher, was born when Chaplin was 73. Dolores and Carmen’s cousins Oona, an actress recently seen in the BBC drama The Hour playing Dominic West’s wife, and Kiera, a model, are also keeping the Chaplin name alive.

Chaplin made his final home with Oona in Vevey, Switzerland, and his granddaughters visited her there often. With a fur-lined Rolls-Royce and servants in white gloves, the grand and glamorous house was a world away from life on the farm. The girls gradually came to realise that stars such as David Bowie, James Mason, Walter Matthau and Carol Grace were legends, rather than just ‘lovely and amazing’ eccentrics they had met there. Dolores remembers playing on bikes with Bowie’s son, and being transfixed by Grace’s trademark white make-up. ‘My grandmother was very beautiful and very intelligent but also very sad,’ says Carmen. ‘She was so young when she was with him, and she still had so much of her life ahead of her. She was only 52, I think, when she was widowed, but she never really recovered from his death.’ Oona died in 1991 and the girls’ parents are transforming the family home into a museum. Carmen goes on to tell me that when Chaplin died, Oona burned his love letters so that they would remain private: ‘To want to keep something very private from somebody so public... that’s very romantic.’ ES