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Lita Theater Lecture

Lita Grey was an American actress best known for her roles in Charlie Chaplin films like The Kid, The Idle Class, and The Gold Rush. She married Chaplin in 1924 when she was 16 and he was 35 after she became pregnant with their first child. Their marriage was troubled and they divorced in 1927 in a public scandal due to his affairs, with Grey receiving one of the largest divorce settlements at the time. She later married three more times and worked as a clerk before writing two autobiographical books about her life with Chaplin.

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35 views

Lita Theater Lecture

Lita Grey was an American actress best known for her roles in Charlie Chaplin films like The Kid, The Idle Class, and The Gold Rush. She married Chaplin in 1924 when she was 16 and he was 35 after she became pregnant with their first child. Their marriage was troubled and they divorced in 1927 in a public scandal due to his affairs, with Grey receiving one of the largest divorce settlements at the time. She later married three more times and worked as a clerk before writing two autobiographical books about her life with Chaplin.

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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Lita Grey (born Lillita Louise MacMurray, April 15, 1908 – December 29, 1995), who was known

for most
of her life as Lita Grey Chaplin, was an American actress. She was the second wife of Charlie Chaplin, and
appeared in his films The Kid, The Idle Class, and The Gold Rush.

Background

She was born in Hollywood, California, to Lillian Carrillo Curry Grey and Robert Earl McMurray,[1][2] and
christened Lillita Louise MacMurray. Her father was of Scottish descent, and her mother's family was
descended from an illustrious ninth-generation Californian Hispanic family, whose luminaries included
Antonio Maria Lugo.[3] The Lugos were from Andalusia, Spain, and were one of the first families to bring
horses to the country.[4][5] In a 1993 interview, Grey claimed to be a great-grandniece of former
California governor Henry Gage.[6]

Life and career

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Grey married four times. By her own account she first met Charlie Chaplin at the age of eight at a
Hollywood café, and first worked with him at the age of 12 in the part of the "flirting angel" in The
Kid.[6][7] She also appeared briefly as a maid in The Idle Class. Her one-year contract was not renewed.
At the age of 15, she met Chaplin again when she heard he was testing brunettes for his next film The
Gold Rush.[8] She was initially cast as the leading lady in the film, and began an affair with the then-35-
year-old Chaplin.

Grey soon became pregnant, and since Chaplin could have been imprisoned for having sexual relations
with a minor, they married that November in secret in Empalme, Sonora, Mexico, to avoid a scandal.
She alleged in her divorce complaint that he "sought to have her undergo an illegal operation to prevent
the birth of their first child".[9]

They had two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr. and Sydney Chaplin, born within ten months of each other in May
1925 and March 1926, respectively.[10][6]

Grey in The Kid (1921)


The marriage was troubled from the start.[11] The two had few interests in common, and Chaplin spent
as much time as he could away from home, working on The Gold Rush, and later, The Circus. They
divorced on August 22, 1927,[12][13][14] due to his alleged numerous affairs with other women, and he
was ordered to pay over US$600,000 ($10.1 million in 2022 dollars[15]) and US$100,000 ($1.7 million in
2022 dollars[15]) in trust for each child, the largest divorce settlement at the time. Copies of her lengthy
divorce complaint, which made scandalous sexual claims against Chaplin, were published, and publicly
sold,[16] and the divorce became a sensational media event.[17][18][19][20][21] Less than five months
after the divorce, Grey's former butler Don Solovich was murdered in Utah, and articles speculated
about connections between Chaplin and the murder.[22][23][24]

She later married Henry Aguirre and Arthur Day. The 1940 United States Census states that Lita and
Arthur lived at 38 East 50th Street in New York City, and that in 1935 she had lived in England. The
census listed her occupation as "singer", and Arthur's as "manager personal". Lita and Arthur adopted a
baby boy in 1940, whom they named Robert. When they split up in 1946, Bobby went to live with his
paternal grandmother, and Lita had little contact with him after that.[25] She married her fourth
husband, Patsy Pizzolongo (aka Pat Longo), on September 22, 1956, in Los Angeles, California. They were
divorced in June 1966.[citation needed]

In the 1970s and 1980s, she worked as a clerk at Robinson's Department Store in Beverly Hills. She
wrote two autobiographical volumes covering her life with Chaplin. My Life with Chaplin (1966) was, by
her own admission, largely a work of exaggeration and fabrication. She claimed to tell the story as it
really was in her second memoir Wife of the Life of the Party (1998).[26] She is portrayed by Deborah
Moore in the 1992 film Chaplin, but Grey was depicted on screen for less than a minute in the final film.

Death

She died of cancer on December 29, 1995, in Los Angeles, aged 87, and was buried in Valhalla Memorial
Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, California.[19][27][28]

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