Oona Chaplin (May 13, 1926 – September 27, 1991) was the daughter of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill and his second wife, writer Agnes Boulton, and the fourth wife of actor Charlie Chaplin. May 13 is the 133rd day of the year (134th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1926 (MCMXXVI) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 270th day of the year (271st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1991 (MCMXCI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the 1991 Gregorian calendar). ... Nobel Prize medal. ... The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest national honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical composition. ... A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. ... Eugene Gladstone ONeill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was a Nobel- and four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. ... Agnes Boulton was a successful pulp fiction writer in the 1910s, later the wife of Eugene ONeill. ... Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr. ...

Oona - the Irish form of her mother's name, Agnes - was born while her parents were living in Bermuda, and during a period of heavy drinking by Eugene O'Neill. She was two years old when her father left the family to pursue a relationship with actress Carlotta Monterey who became his third wife. Oona and her brother, Shane (born 1919), saw the playwright infrequently afterward.

Growing up, Oona spent her summers in the Boulton family's rambling Victorian house in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. The rest of the year she lived in Manhattan with her mother, where she attended the Brearley School. In 1942, at the age of seventeen, she was named "Debutante of the Year". Asked by a reporter whether she considered herself to be "lace curtain" Irish or "shanty" Irish, she replied, "Shanty Irish!" At about the same time, Oona decided to pursue an acting career (rather than attend Vassar College), and subsequently got a part in a stock company stage production of Pal Joey. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Vassar College is a private, coeducational, highly selective liberal arts college situated in Poughkeepsie, New York. ... Pal Joey Studio cast album 1950 Pal Joey is a 1940 Broadway musical by American writer John OHara, with music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. ...

She had romantic relationships with satirical cartoonist Peter Arno, actor-director Orson Welles, and the then 22-year-old author J. D. Salinger. To Salinger's disappointment, the relationship ended when she met British-born actor/director/producer Charlie Chaplin, after having been suggested for a role in his never-completed film Shadow and Substance. Peter Arno (1904 - 1968) was a U.S. cartoonist. ... This article contains a trivia section. ... Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for The Catcher in the Rye, a classic novel that has enjoyed enduring popularity since its publication in 1951. ... Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr. ...

Chaplin later wrote that he was immediately smitten by Oona's "luminous beauty" and "sequestered charm", and despite a thirty-six-year age difference, they began and affair and were married in Carpinteria, California, on June 16, 1943, when he was fifty-four and she was eighteen. Carpinteria is a small oceanside city located in the southeastern extremity of Santa Barbara County, California, east of Santa Barbara and northwest of Ventura. ... June 16 is the 167th day of the year (168th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1943 (MCMXLIII) was a common year starting on Friday (the link will display full 1943 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...

According to author Jane Scovell (Oona: Living in the Shadows. A Biography of Oona O'Neill Chaplin), Salinger sent her "a scathing, scatological letter describing in disgusting detail his version of the Chaplins' wedding night." In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces. ...

For his part, Eugene O'Neill was so incensed at the union (he had refused to give his consent so that Oona could marry Chaplin before her eighteenth birthday), that he cut her out of his life, refusing all attempts by her at a reconciliation. According to Scovell, playwright Clifford Odets "saw something vindictive in O'Neill's behaviour and thought that O'Neill could not forgive Oona perhaps because he had abandoned her ...". Her father had already been angered by her appearance in national magazines as a starlet, but had only briefly had a meaningful relationship with any of his children. Of Oona's two brothers, Eugene O'Neill Jr., the son of a woman her father had reneged on a promise to marry before attaining success as a writer, suffered from alcoholism, and committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 40, and Shane O'Neill, a heroin addict, moved into the family home in Bermuda, Spithead, with his new wife and supported himself by selling off the furnishings, was disowned by their father before also committing suicide. Clifford Odets photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1937 Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 - August 18, 1963) was an American socialist playwright, screenwriter, and social protester. ...

Chaplin and Oona maintained a very close, loving, and clearly co-dependent relationship for the next 35 years. Chaplin was her father's age and was also an internationally renowned figure, and there was clearly a paternal "father-figure" aspect to her relationship with him. For her part, she provided the demanding Chaplin with unquestioned loyalty and support, just as his public popularity was eroding, and later as his health failed in his final years.

While attending the London premiere of his film Limelight in September 1952, Chaplin was accused of "Communist sympathies" and barred re-entry into the United States. Because of the tax laws in England, the family (which by then included four children), was forced to relocate to Switzerland. Oona bravely returned to the United States by herself to close their California house, and to surreptitiously collect all of Chaplin's assets from safe deposit boxes – even as the FBI was questioning the members of their staff. She later admitted to sewing $1,000 bills into the lining of her mink coat, thereby saving the Chaplin fortune. Limelight is a 1952 film written, directed by and starring Charles Chaplin, co-starring Claire Bloom, with a guest appearance by Buster Keaton. ...

Chaplin and Oona had eight children: three sons, Michael (born in 1946), Eugene (born in 1953), and Christoper (born in 1962, when Chaplin was seventy-three), and five daughters, actress Geraldine Chaplin (born in 1944), Josie (born in 1949), Vicky (born in 1951), Jane (born in 1957), and Annie (born in 1959). Despite the size of their family, the temperamental Chaplin always insisted on being put first in Oona's life, and he was – often to the detriment of their children. Michael Chaplin (born 7 March 1946) is an Anglo-American actor born in Santa Monica, California. ... Eugene Chaplin is the son of actor/comedian/director Sir Charlie Chaplin and his last wife, Oona ONeill. ... Total Eclipse is a 1995 movie directed by Agnieszka Holland that depicts a fictionalized account of the intense but also abusive homosexual relationship between the two 19th century French poets, Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio), a time when both of them experienced a height of creativity. ... Geraldine Chaplin (born July 31, 1944 in Santa Monica, California) is an Anglo-American actress. ... Josephine Chaplin (born March 28, 1949 in California) is the daughter of actor/comedian/director Sir Charlie Chaplin and his last wife, Oona ONeill. ... Victoria Chaplin (May 19, 1951-) is an American actor, the daughter of actor/comedian Charlie Chaplin and Oona Chaplin, the daughter of Eugene ONeill. ...

In March, 1975 – three years after briefly returning to the United States to receive a special Academy Award – Chaplin was knighted. He died on Christmas Day, 1977, at the age of eighty-eight. Although he never won an Oscar for any of his movie performances, the comedian Bob Hope received two honorary Oscars for his contributions to cinema. ... Joseph and Mary with baby Jesus, at the first Christmas Christmas (literally, the Mass of Christ) is a holiday in the Christian calendar, usually observed on December 25, which celebrates the birth of Jesus. ... Also: 1977 (album) by Ash. ...

In the years immediately following Chaplin's death, Oona lived in New York and attempted to create a life of her own. But after years of being continually on call to a demanding husband (her tasks were once described as being akin to those of a "duty nurse"), Oona – who had given up the promise of an acting career at the age of eighteen - returned to Switzerland and became more and more reclusive. She increasingly sought oblivion in the O'Neill "family curse" of alcoholism, and died of pancreatic cancer on September 7, 1991, at the age of 66. Alcoholism is the consumption of, or preoccupation with, alcoholic beverages to the extent that this behavior interferes with the drinkers normal personal, family, social, or work life, and may lead to physical or mental harm. ... Pancreatic cancer is a malignant tumour within the pancreatic gland. ...

Geraldine thought very highly of her mother, and when she was cast in Doctor Zhivago (1965), she decided to base her performance as the title character's wife on her mother, whom she described as "a woman who was willing to give her life to an artist." Doctor Zhivago (Russian: Доктор Живаго) is a 1965 film directed by David Lean and loosely based on the famous novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak. ...

In 2006, Chaplin's granddaughter Kiera Chaplin (daughter of Eugene Chaplin) visited Tao House, where her maternal grandfather lived. She has announced that she would like to play her grandmother in a film. Kiera Chaplin (born 1 July 1982) is an American actress and model, a grandaughter of Charlie Chaplin and a great-granddaughter of Eugene ONeill. ...

The same year, Jane Chaplin announced she had written a memoir about her life called "Seventeen Minutes with my Father". She says the book will not be easy on her mother. She is currently looking for an agent.

References

• Chaplin, Patrice: Hidden Star (written by her ex-daughter-in-law)
• Saroyan, Aram: Trio (details the friendship between Oona O'Neill, Saroyan's mother Carol Saroyan, and Gloria Vanderbilt)
• Matthau, Carol: Among the Porcupines
• Scovell, Jane: Oona: Living in the Shadows