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Photo Essays
1. Exile’s Return
2. Chaplin’s Parents
3. Hannah Chaplin’s Femmes Fatales
4. Playing Dress-Up  In The Land of Make Believe
5. Teenage Girls and Fear of Aging
6. Chaplin’s Three Teenage Wives
7. Mildred Harris
8. Lita Grey
9. Oona O’Neill
10. Chaplin’s Father
11. A Royal Lion
12. Vesta Tilley as Bertie
13. Ella Shields as Bertie
14. Making A Living
15. The Lion Comique’s Son: Dressed Like A Bum
16. Monsieur Verdoux as a Lion Comique
17. Calvero as a Lion Comique
18. The Lion Comique’s Son in the Limelight
19. Charlie as a Child
20. The Kid’s Lucky Break
21. Syd Chaplin
22. A Family Album of Theatrical Drunks
23. Chaplin’s Family Romance
24. Edna Purviance
25. Purviance’s Influence on Chaplin’s Character
26. Essanay
27. Chaplinitis
28. Chaplin’s Predecessors
29. Eye Contact: Audience-Performer Intimacy
30. Chaplin the Auteur
31. Chaplin’s Two Autobiographies
32. Going It Alone
33. The Circus
34. Autobiographical Starvation Scenes From The Gold Rush
35. Autobiographical Madness Scenes in Modern Times
36. Two British Music Hall Traditions and Topical Comedy
37. The Great Dictator
38. Fatal Attraction: Joan Barry
39. Monsieur Verdoux: Guillotine or Hatchet Job?
40. Limelight
 
Chaplin: A Life In Film
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 The Circus
 
When Mildred and Charlie  first met he was the most famous movie star in the world and  she was an aspiring 16-year-old actress. Chaplin recalled: “Mildred was a pretty thing—not breathtaking…[or] overly bright, but she had a way about her that made me think I could do something for her, educate her, wake her up…I tried and she seemed willing…[but]…it didn’t work. I was very fond of her, and we got married…for a while I kept hoping she wouldn’t let go of her youth—the spirit of youth, the spirit of being gay and forever incorruptible—but she lost it…she turned out to be as selfish and cynical as a brawling fishwife.” 

Describing their  marriage Harris recalled: “it [was] hard…to be the wife of a genius…I did not always understand him and I felt inferior to him. He was short tempered, impatient and treated me like a cretin. Yet I still admire him. He could have taught me so much.”

Although he may have felt intellectually superior to Harris, Chaplin   bitterly resented her  for outsmarting  him. She  conned  him into marrying  her by falsely claiming she was pregnant. And she later   took him to the cleaners in a lucrative divorce settlement. During their brief marriage she did become pregnant but that baby died at birth. During the divorce that followed this loss, when Louis B. Mayer attempt to crassly exploit Chaplin’s  domestic difficulties by trying to sign  Mildred Harris up to a film contract  billing her  as Mrs. Charlie Chaplin. L.B.  and  Charlie  actually squared off and got into a brief fist fight (with Mayer landing a sucker punch).
 
 
 
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