Geraldine Chaplin

Posted on by Tony CrawleyCategories:Actors

  1. Charmian Carr, The Sound of Music, 1964.     Chaplin was in director Robert Wise’s loop for a screen debut as  Liesel Von Trapp – with three other  daughters of the famous: Judy Garland’s Liza Minnelli, Maureen O’Sullivan’s Mia Farrow and  and Ann Sothern’s Tisha Sterling.  Plus Kim Darby, Patty Duke, Sharon Tate and Lesley Ann Warren. Critic Pauline Kael famously tried to bury “the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat” but it  saved Fox from the near bankruptcy  of the Cleopatra debacle.

  2. Françoise Dorléac, Les demoiselles de  Rochefort, France, 1966.       Jacques Demy’s original twins were Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn. Quoi? OK, then BB and Chaplin!  Pardon?  Oh, yeah, sure why not – the Dorléac sisters: Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorleac. 

  3. Jane Fonda, Barefoot in the Park, 1967.         One cinema  ikon’s daughter for another… Due as her US debut for star-finder general Hal Wallis. “Only reason I agreed to  test was because I  didn’t have a job after leaving the Sadler Wells Ballet and I was broke. And when I left home,  I insisted I was going  to earn my own way.”  Finally made her Hollywood debut as one of The Hawaiians, 1969.  

  4. Geneviève Bujold, Anne of the Thousand Days, 1968.       The next plan of producer Hal Wallis… opposite Peter O’Toole as a remarkably thin Henry VIII. Also up for the chop: Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway, Olivia Hussey, Charlotte Rampling and a way too old Elizabeth Taylor – when Richard Burton finally became the king..
  5. Isabelle  Adjani,  Quartet,  UK-France, 1980.          Almost her second Merchant-Ivory film.
  6. Julie Christie, Heat and Dust, 1983.        Almost her third…
  7. Sabine Azéma, L’amour a Mort, France, 1984.     Therefore, she  lost all the other  films that Alain Resnais made with same brochette of actors.
  8. Twiggy,  The Doctor And The  Devils,  1985.      Originally set opposite Laurence Harvey in Belgrade, when the sole movie project  of Welsh poet was 37 years  old –  the  world record delay between the completion and shooting of a movie script.  Swansea’s Dylan called himself, the Rimbaud of Cymdonkin Drive.
  9. Nathalie Roussel,  Le Gloire de Mon Pere, France, 1990.        (What a title for her!!!) Playwright and cineaste Marcel Pagnol had chosen Chaplin to play his mother in the autobiography planned as his last film.  

 Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls:  9