Old Hollywood Relationships With Controversial Age Gaps

Charlie Chaplin, born in 1889, married four times. Three of those wives were teenagers, two of them underage. His first wife, Mildred Harris, told her version of their meeting in a syndicated newspaper article in 1927. She wrote he’d seen her in a film when she was 12, and met her when she was 15. While they began a relationship, Harris admitted she was still very young mentally as well as in age. They married when she was 16 because she mistakenly believed she was pregnant, then divorced two years later.

Chaplin’s second wife, Lita Grey, was 12 when they met and pregnant with his child by 15. Their subsequent marriage also only lasted a few years. In 1932, first wife Harris told a reporter (via The Vancouver Sun) in regards to the two divorces, “Too much sweet 16 — that’s Charlie’s trouble. What he needs, to be really happy, is a woman of about 30, a woman with a full knowledge of human nature…” Chaplin would almost take that advice when he married the third time, to the comparatively ancient Paulette Goddard, who was about 25 at the time of the ceremony in 1936. Regardless, the couple divorced after six years.

His final and longest marriage by far was to Oona O’Neill (pictured), daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. She was 18 and he was 54 (just six months younger than her father) when they married, and they stayed together until his death 34 years later.