Lita Grey in 1925
|Born||Lillita Louise MacMurray
April 15, 1908
Hollywood, California, U.S.
|Died||December 29, 1995
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
|Children||Charles Chaplin, Jr.
Sydney Earl Chaplin
Lita Grey (April 15, 1908 – December 29, 1995) was an American actress and the second wife of Charlie Chaplin. She was born in Hollywood, California, in 1908, to a Mexican-born mother and a father of Irish heritage and christened Lillita Louise MacMurray.
Grey married four times. In 1924, when she was 16 years old, she suspected she had become pregnant by Charlie Chaplin, who was then 35. Chaplin, who could have been imprisoned for having sexual relations with a minor, married her that November in secret in Empalme, Sonora, Mexico to avoid a scandal. They had two sons, Charles Chaplin, Jr. (1925–1968) and Sydney Earl Chaplin (1926–2009).
The marriage was troubled from the start. The two had few interests in common, and Chaplin spent as much time as he could away from home, working on The Gold Rush (in which Grey was to have played the female lead) and later The Circus. They divorced on August 22, 1927, due to his alleged numerous affairs with other women, and he was ordered to pay over US$600,000 and US$100,000 in trust for each child. It was the largest divorce settlement at the time. The divorce was one of the sensational media events of the time. Copies of her lengthy divorce complaint which made then-scandalous sexual claims against Chaplin were published and publicly sold.
She later married Henry Aguirre and later Arthur Day. According to the 1940 United States Census, Lita and Arthur lived at 38 East 50th Street, in New York City, New York, and that in 1935, she had lived in England. The census listed her occupation as "singer," and Arthur's as "manager personal." She married her fourth husband, Patsy Pizzolongo (aka Pat Longo), on 22 September 1956, in Los Angeles, California. They were divorced in June 1966.
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 (1995). Grey was portrayed by Deborah Moore in the 1992 film Chaplin, though Grey was depicted on screen for less than a minute in the final film.
- Unknown Chaplin (1983) (TV)
- The Devil's Sleep (1949)
- Seasoned Greetings (1933)
- Mr. Broadway (1933)
- The Idle Class (1921)
- The Kid (1921)
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lita Grey.|
- video: Lita Grey describes Charlie Chaplin on YouTube, 15 min. - 2-parts
- Lita Grey at the Internet Movie Database
- Lita Grey at Virtual History
- Grey, Lita; Vance, Jeffery (March 1, 1988). Wife of the life of the party. Scarecrow Press. p. 306.