She’s inherited his eyes, sparkling with the legendary sense of humour and the always-ready-to-grin mouth. The daughter of the greatest comedian of all time and an actress in her own right, talks about, well, being Geraldine Chaplin

Oh Well, I Might As Well Act Then!
Frankly, acting was the last thing I wanted to do. I actually wanted to be a dancer. I trained hard for it and even danced professionally for a while. But I realised that I was never really very good at it. So actually, I went into acting out of pure laziness and lack of direction.

As soon as I said I wanted to act, I got an agent (the first agent I contacted, by the way) and a great movie. After doing ‘Doctor Zhivago’, I fell in love with acting. I finally realised, and about time that I did, how difficult it is to make a movie, the challenges that are involved, and how amazing the entire process of filmmaking is.

Chaplin On The Sets
I have often wondered why I didn’t resent the fact that people were asking me to act in their films just because of the Chaplin name. Over the years I have realised why. My father was a man who was tremendously loved by everyone. People identified with him — the poor people, the under trodden people; they all identified with him.

I expected to receive the normal cool welcome that an actor’s daughter would get — people thinking ‘Oh, she’s just here as she is so and so’s daughter’, which was even true in my case. But when I started working on the set, people treated me like I was their daughter, every last member of the crew. They helped me and pushed me to be good just because they loved my father so much.

Talking Movies With Daddy
Oh gosh, my father was so very upset at my decision to join films. He was horrified. In fact, we didn’t speak for about six years. He said I was just cashing in on the family name, which incidentally, was true.

Actually, I think he didn’t want to subject his children to the cruelty this profession is capable of by way of rejection. Also, he really never went to school, so all he wanted for his children was that they take to professions like medicine and engineering.

But once I did ‘Doctor Zhivago’, he saw that everything was going to be ok, and he became a fan. I wanted some constructive criticism and asked him what he thought of the film. When he said, ‘You are the best thing in it’, I knew he had become a father again.

Analysing Chaplin?
I can never study his work. Every time I put on one of his films I get totally involved in it, even if I have seen it a 100 times. That’s the beauty of his films. You can’t really analyse them. He had a universal languge. The humour of language is very difficult because you have to translate it, while humour of the body is universal. I mean everyone laughs when someone slips on a banana peal — that’s universal.

I was in Georgia recently at the University of Arts and Design. The animation teacher there used Charlie Chaplin images from ‘The Great Dictator’, where he plays both, the Jewish barber and Hitler, to teach her students.

She pointed out something really interesting. The process involves taking an image and turning it into animation and she discovered that my father’s body movement for both roles is so completely different from one character to another. It wasn’t just the expressions or posture, but the entire body language changed when he was playing different characters. It was fascinating.

How Chaplin Am I?