Keira Chaplin

With one of the most famous surnames in Hollywood, it is perhaps of little surprise that Keira Chaplin followed in the footsteps of a famous ancestor and forged a career in showbusiness. A successful actress and model, Keira has amassed a personal fortune in excess of £30million; her screen credits include The Importance of Being Ernest with Rupert Everett and Colin Firth in 2002 and is one of the UK's wealthiest entertainers, owning a stake in Limelight Films. However, she now lives abroad in Los Angeles with her fiance. Have you guessed who her famous relative is yet?

To whom is she related?

Keira Chaplin was born in Belfast in 1982, the daughter of Eugene Chaplin and his wife Bernadette McCready. We only have to go back one further generation to find a stellar link in her family tree, because Eugene's father was none other than Charles Spencer Chaplin - better known to the world as Charlie Chaplin, born to music hall entertainers on 16 April 1889 in East Street, Walworth. His career started as a child entertainer, when in 1894 at the age of 5 he performed in the absence of his mother one night at Aldershot Theatre, and never looked back, continuing to work in the industry right up to his death in 1977 at the age of 88.

“Charlie ended up in Lambeth Workhouse before moving to the Central London District School for paupers”

Charlie's childhood was clearly difficult. His parents separated before he was 3 years old; his mother, Hannah Harriet Hill, was the daughter of a bootmaker, Charles Hill, and brought up young Charlie on her own. However, she suffered from schizophrenia and was eventually admitted to Cane Hill Asylum, which meant Charlie ended up in Lambeth Workhouse before moving to the Central London District School for paupers; his father Charles Chaplin senior had died by the time Charlie was 12 years old. It was about this time that he gravitated towards his parents' profession, and in the 1901 census he was to be found living with a troupe of young music hall artistes in Lambeth.

Charlie Chaplin is perhaps remembered for his character The Tramp in silent comedy films in the 1910s, with his trademark ill-fitting cloths, hat, cane and pencil moustache, in a series of films in the 1910s, as well his controversial parody of Hitler in The Great Dictator in 1940. Yet Chaplin's personal life was equally controversial; he had a close relationship with his first major leading lady, Edna Purviance, between 1916-1917, but by 1918 he had married the 16 year old Mildred Harris when he was 29. By 1920 they had divorced, having lost their only child Norman. After a brief but stormy affair with Polish actress Pola Negri from 1922-1923, he married another sixteen year old, Lita Grey, after she became pregnant. This marriage lasted four years and was acrimoniously ended; his next relationship lasted 8 years, with Paulette Goddard, but they never wed. After a brief affair in 1943 with Joan Berry, Chaplin married for a final time in 1943 at the age of 54; his bride was Edna O'Neill, aged only 17. They enjoyed a long and happy life together, blessed with 8 children, including Keira's father Eugene.

However, Edna's father, the playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, was only one year older than Chaplin at the time of their marriage, and disapproved so much that he refused to have anything to do with the couple, severing all ties with his daughter. Eugene was famous in his own right, winning both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for his written work, but was born into circumstances similar to those of his son-in-law. His father was a stage actor from Ireland, James O'Neill, and Eugene was born in a Broadway hotel, and spent most of his early years backstage at whichever theatre his father were working at. His mother Ella Quinlan became addicted to morphine, a direct result of complications associated with Eugene's birth when she was first administered the drug as a painkiller.

Until now, little has been written about earlier branches of the Chaplin family. One final twist concerns a former ancestral home. Charles Chaplin senior was born in 1863, the son of a journeyman butcher Spencer Chaplin, who lived at 15 Rillington Place in the 1870s and 1880s - five doors down from the scene of the infamous Christie murders in the 1940s and 1950s?

What's in a name?

The surname Chaplin owes its origins in the church, being a derivative of 'chaplain', which in turn has roots in Anglo-French (chapelain) and Latin (capellan). Therefore anyone who bears the name Chaplin or one of its derivatives can trace their ancestry back to an individual who worked in a minor ecclesiastical position.