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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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© 2008 All Essay Rights Reserved.
All images from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards, Copyright © Roy
Export Company Establishment._Charles Chaplin and the Little Tramp are trademarks and/or
service marks of Bubbles Inc. S.A. and/or Roy Export Company
Establishment, used with permission. |
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