Overview

Geraldine Chaplin is the most distinguished actor among Charlie Chaplin's children. Through her collaborations with major international film directors, she has created a striking performative presence across international cinema. Her acting also evokes, with varying levels of self-consciousness and in shifting cinematic contexts, the memory of her father's screen performances. This book analyses the distinctive screen art of Geraldine Chaplin and uncover parallels between her performances and her father's work on film. Through this method, this star study explores the rich and surprising relationships between art cinema and silent film comedy, and between modernist and classical cinematic performance. It offers a long overdue appreciation of Geraldine Chaplin's own remarkable screen achievements, all the while shedding new insight into the art of Charlie Chaplin through the singular prism of his daughter's bold work.

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9781474427968

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Reviews

Dr. Steven Rybin has taken on a difficult task: a bio-study of the progeny of one of Hollywood's most important actors, Charlie Chaplin. Geraldine Chaplin has had a productive and successful career on her own, but Rybin has somehow viewed that career through the lens of her father's--in a respectful and useful way. In addition, the prose itself is a pleasure to read. As a Chaplin (Charlie) scholar myself, I can highly recommend Rybin's book.--Lisa Stein Haven, author of Syd Chaplin: A Biography and Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp in America, 1947-1977 I have never read a better analysis of a major actor's career than Steven Rybin's Geraldine Chaplin: The Gift of Film Performance. His account of Chaplin's remarkably diverse body of work is filled with surprises, making the story of her collaborations with David Lean, Carlos Saura, Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph and numerous other directors not only illuminating, but gripping. Especially rewarding are the parallels he establishes not only with her father's career but with Charlie Chaplin's major performances.--George Toles, University of Manitoba Steven Rybin has done us all a service by bringing Geraldine Chaplin's career and art so thoughtfully into view. Through a series of revelatory close readings, he traces her globe-spanning, seven-decade career, which encompassed turns in British, Spanish, French, Italian, Hollywood, and avant-garde cinemas and included career-defining roles in Doctor Zhivago and Nashville. Throughout, Rybin recognizes Chaplin as an avatar of film history: her earliest screen appearance came as a child extra in her father's Limelight; one of her latest saw her playing her own grandmother in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin. Framing Chaplin's career through its distinct echoes with that of her legendary father, Rybin enables us to see how Geraldine Chaplin both embraced and transcended that legacy to become a preeminent screen artist in her own right.--Donna Kornhaber, University of Texas at Austin

Author Information

Dr Steven Rybin is Associate Professor of Film at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the author of several books including Geraldine Chaplin (2020), Gestures of Love: Romancing Performance in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2017), Michael Mann (2013) and Terence Malik and the Thought of Film (2011). He is editor of The Cinema of Hal Hartley (2016), Hamlet Lives in Hollywood (2017) and Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s (2022).

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