Lita Grey

Lita Grey (April 15, 1908 – December 29, 1995) was an American actress and the second wife of Charles 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 4 times. In 1924 when she was 16 years old, she became pregnant by Charles Chaplin, who was then 35. Chaplin, who could have been imprisoned for having sexual relations with a minor, married her in secret in Mexico to avoid a scandal. They had two children, Charles Chaplin, Jr. (1925-1968) and Sydney Earle Chaplin (b. 1926).

The marriage was troubled from the start. The two had few interests in common, and Chaplin spent as much time as he could away from home, working on "The Gold Rush" (in which Grey was to have played the female lead) and later "The Circus." They divorced on August 22, 1927 due to his alleged numerous affairs with other women, and he was ordered to pay over $600,000 (USD) and $100,000 (USD) in trust for each child. It was the largest divorce settlement up to that time. The divorce was one of the sensational media events of the time. Copies of her lengthy divorce complaint which made then-scandalous sexual claims against Chaplin were published and publicly sold.

She later married Henry Aguirre, then Arthur Day, then Pat Long.

In the 1970s and 1980s, she worked as a clerk at Robinson's Department Store in Beverley Hills.

She died in Los Angeles, California in 1995 of cancer, aged 87, and in buried in Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, California.

She wrote two autobiographical volumes covering her life with Chaplin. My Life With Chaplin (1966) was by her own admission largely a work of exaggeration and fabrication. She claimed to tell the story as it really was in her second memoir Wife of the Life of the Party (1995).

She was portrayed by Deborah Moore in " Chaplin".

The Chaplin biographer Joyce Milton asserted in "Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin" that the Grey-Chaplin marriage was the inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita".

Filmography

*"Unknown Chaplin" (1983) (TV)
*"The Devil's Sleep" (1949)
*"Seasoned Greetings" (1933)
*"Mr. Broadway" (1933)
*"The Idle Class" (1921)
*"The Kid" (1921)

External links

* [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0340614/ IMDB: Lita Grey]
* [http://silentladies.com/Ladies.html Silent Ladies & Gents has some nice images from her career]