Geraldine Chaplin - Career

Career

When Chaplin was eight years old, she appeared uncredited in her father's film Limelight. She attended the Royal Ballet School but, when her dream of becoming a ballet dancer ended, she followed her father into the acting profession. David Lean chose her to play Tonya, the main character's wife, in his film Doctor Zhivago, (1965) for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. In an interview to publicise the film, she explained, "Because of my name, the right doors opened." In 1967, she made her Broadway debut in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. Her performance was praised by Clive Barnes in a review published in The New York Times. Barnes noted that Chaplin "acts with spirit and force," all the while "acting with a magnificently raw-voiced sincerity" in what was a performance of "surprising power."

In the same year, she also began what would become a significant collaboration when she starred in Carlos Saura's Spanish language psychological thriller, Peppermint Frappé. She later starred in (and occasionally co-wrote scripts for) later Saura films such as Ana and the Wolves (1973), Cría cuervos (1976), Elisa, vida mía (1977) and Mamá cumple cien años (1979). Cría cuervos is regarded as their finest collaboration, winning the Special Jury Prize Award at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. Vincent Canby praised Chaplin's "superb" performance.

In 1970, she starred alongside Charlton Heston in the American historical film The Hawaiians. In 1974 she starred in The Three Musketeers, as well as the sequel a year later, The Four Musketeers. In 1975 she starred as the obnoxious BBC reporter Opal in Robert Altman's Nashville, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She later starred in the Altman films Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) and A Wedding (1978).

In an interview with The New York Times in 1977, Chaplin cited that her career was going more successfully in Europe than in the United States. She complained that "I only seem to work with Altman here ... I don't have any offers in this country, none. Not even an interesting script to read. The only person who ever asks me is Altman - and James Ivory."

She starred in several films produced by Altman and directed by Alan Rudolph, with a BAFTA-nominated role in Welcome to L.A. (1976), in which she played a housewife addicted to cab rides. She received critical acclaim for her role in Remember My Name (1978), in which she played Anthony Perkins' murderous estranged wife. She also starred in Rudolph's 1920s set film The Moderns (1988). She has also starred in several French-language roles, including Jacques Rivette's Love on the Ground (1984) and the Alain Resnais films Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983) and I Want to Go Home (1989). In 1992, she played the role of her grandmother Hannah Chaplin in the biographical film about her father, Chaplin, for which she was nominated for another Golden Globe award. A year later she was directed by Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence. In 1996 she appeared in Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre.

Chaplin received a Goya Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Spanish-Argentine thriller, In the City Without Limits (2001). Other notable Spanish films she appeared in include Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002) and José Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (2007), for which she received a Goya Award nomination. She also recently starred in the Catalan drama, The Mosquito Net (2010), for which she was awarded the Crystal Globe. In 2006 Chaplin was awarded the Gold medal by the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España for her contribution to cinema.

She recently appeared in independent films, Americano, a drama alongside Salma Hayek and ...And If We All Lived Together with Jane Fonda. She has also reunited with Juan Antonio Bayona for the upcoming film, The Impossible.