Actress Josephine Chaplin, the sixth of 11 children of comic actor Charlie Chaplin, passed away at 74 on July 13 in Paris, France, as confirmed by her family.
A funeral will be held in Paris "in the intimacy of the family."
Josephine Hannah Chaplin was born on March 28, 1949, in Santa Monica, California. Her parents, Charlie Chaplin and his fourth wife, British actress Oona O'Neill (daughter of Nobel Prize-winning writer Eugene O'Neill), had eight children together. Geraldine and Michael were born to her parents before she was born in a 1943 marriage.
Movie Industry Success
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Chaplin appeared in Menahem Golan's Escape to the Sun (1972) alongside Laurence Harvey as a group of individuals trying to flee the Soviet Union to avoid antisemitism and political persecution.
She also worked together with Vittorio De Sica and Maurice Ronet in 1972's L'odeur Des Fauves. She played in Daniel Petrie's 1984 film The Bay Boy, which starred Liv Ullmann and Kiefer Sutherland, and 1976's German-language adaptation of Jack the Ripper, in which she starred with Klaus Kinski.
In a miniseries starring Stacy Keach from 1988, she played Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife.
Chaplin co-starred with her siblings, Geraldine and Michael, in the opening scene of Limelight (1952). It is a comedy-drama film that her father wrote, directed, and starred in.
Chaplin also featured in her father's A Countess From Hong Kong (1967). Moreover, she portrayed May in the X-rated 1972 film adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales.
Most of Chaplin's playing career took place in French films, such as Nuits Rouges (1974) and L'ombre D'un été (1976), where she had been a resident for many years. Her final known film appearance was with Mike Connors in 1994's Ciudad Baja.
Life With Family
In 1978, she and her family were targeted in an odd attempt at blackmail by two men who stole the corpse and coffin of her father, who had passed away in Switzerland on Christmas Day the year before. His family did not pay a ransom to have his body returned to them, and it took 11 weeks to find his grave. In 1991, her mother Oona passed away.
For many years, she oversaw the Paris Chaplin office on behalf of her siblings. She also paid for a monument of their father to be erected in Waterville, Ireland, where they often vacationed.
From 1969 until their divorce in 1977, Chaplin was married to Greek businessman Nikki Sistovaris. She then moved in with French actor Maurice Ronet until his death in 1983.
Jean-Claude Gardin, an archaeologist, was her second spouse. They were married from 1989 until his death in 2013.
Her siblings, Geraldine and Michael, are still alive, as well as her sisters, Victoria, Jane, and Annette; her brothers Eugene and Christopher; and sons Charly, Julien, and Arthur.
