Josephine Chaplin, actor and daughter of comedy legend Charlie Chaplin and his fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, has died. She was aged 74.
Chaplin died on July 13 in Paris, according to an announcement from her family. 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. Josephine Chaplin was born in Santa Monica, California, in March 1949.
She began her career on screen at a young age in her father’s 1952 ‘Limelight’. During her career, she starred in a number of foreign films.
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 also appeared in his ‘A Countess from Hong Kong’ in 1967. Chaplin did most of her work in French films. 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.
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”
