Josephine Chaplin, the daughter of Charlie Chaplin and his fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, died on 13 July in Paris, her family said on Friday. The actor, who starred in films including Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Canterbury Tales, was 74.
Josephine Chaplin was the sixth of 11 children fathered by the comedic screen legend and the third of eight with O’Neill, an actor and daughter of the Nobel prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill.
Chaplin met O’Neill in 1942 and married her the following year. According to the Chaplin Office, the star of silent cinema “at last found true happiness, and it seems they had both found their soul mates, despite the fact that Oona was only 18, and Charlie was 53”.
Josephine Chaplin was born in Santa Monica, California, in March 1949.
As an actor, she starred in Menahem Golan’s politically orientated Escape to the Sun; with Vittorio De Sica and Maurice Ronet in L’odeur des fauves; with Klaus Kinski in a German-language Jack the Ripper; and in Daniel Petrie’s The Bay Boy with Liv Ullman and Kiefer Sutherland.
She first appeared on screen aged three, in Limelight, the 1952 film written, directed by and starring her father. She also appeared in his A Countess from Hong Kong, in 1967. But Chaplin did most of her work in French films, among them Nuits rouges and À l’ombre d’un été.
In later life, Chaplin managed the Chaplin family office in Paris and sponsored a statue of her father in Waterville, Ireland.
A longtime resident of Paris, she was caught up in a bizarre extortion plot soon after the death of her father in 1978, when two men stole his body and coffin. The family refused to pay a ransom and the remains were recovered 11 weeks later. Oona O’Neill died in 1991.
Josephine Chaplin married twice, to the Greek businessman Nikki Sistovaris and the archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin. She also lived with Ronet, a one-time co-star.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Chaplin is survived by her brothers Michael, Eugene and Christopher; sisters Geraldine, Victoria, Jane and Annette; and her sons Charly, Julien and Arthur. The notice announcing her death said a funeral would take place in Paris “in the intimacy of the family”.
