Wheeler Dryden - Life and Career

Life and Career

Dryden was born in London. He was the youngest of the children of Hannah Chaplin (née Hill); his father Leo removed him from his mentally troubled mother as an infant. He was touring India and the Far East as a vaudeville comedian in 1915 when he first learned from his father that the newly famous Charlie Chaplin was his half brother.

At this point, he wrote several letters to Chaplin and his half-brother Sydney but was ignored by both of them. In 1917, he got in touch with Chaplin's lead actress Edna Purviance who is thought to have convinced Chaplin to recognise him as his relative. He then joined the Chaplin brothers and their mother in America in 1918, and became a U.S. citizen in 1936.

He later appeared in Stan Laurel's Mud and Sand and was the "other man" in the melodrama False Women. In 1928, he directed Syd Chaplin in A Little Bit of Fluff, and later, worked at the Chaplin Studios as Charlie's assistant director on The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux. He also appears in the supporting roles of a doctor and a clown in Chaplin's last American film, Limelight.

After Chaplin left America for Switzerland in 1952, Dryden managed the winding down of Chaplin's Hollywood business affairs until 1954, when the studio was sold. He suffered from mental illness and reclusiveness in his final years, exacerbated by aggressive FBI inquiries into his brother's politics.

Dryden died in Los Angeles.