Dr Zhivago star Geraldine Chaplin recalls happy memories of Waterville in a documentary tonight on RTÉ One.
Chaplin: The Waterville Picture is a fascinating insight into Charlie Chaplin's love affair with the Kerry town of Waterville and its people.
With invaluable access to the Chaplin archive, this unique film tells the only Chaplin story yet untold.
Chaplin first came to Kerry in 1959 with his wife Oona O'Neill and continued to visit until 1969. His daughter Josephine still comes there and along with her sister Annie has a house in the area.
Julien, her son, went to secondary school here and her other son Arthur (the documentary's narrator) continues to visit Kerry.
Geraldine Chaplin recalls: “They were such happy times. Both my father and my mother were incredible romantics, and Waterville’s the place for romantics, I can tell you.
“I have images of my father and my mother walking along the sea and hearing the gulls; and the wind. 0h! It was so, so romantic.”
An interesting fact that emerges during the documentary is that GAA legend Mick O'Dwyer's mother cooked for Charlie Chaplin in Waterville and Mick is featured in the documentary.
Charlie Chaplin was born in London in 1889 and lived to a ripe age of 88. In his lifetime he became one of the most popular cinema stars in the world and was one of cinema’s first superstars.
His story has been well documented on countless occasions but one important facet of it has been left untold until now - Chaplin's love of Waterville, the town, its environs and its people.
The documentary features the stories of many local people who knew and came into contact with Charlie. Married three times before meeting Oona, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, it was no surprise - given her Irish roots - that the Chaplin family visited Ireland.
Of his children, Geraldine became the most well-known, particularly after her Golden Globe-nominated performance as Tonya in David Lean's 1965 version of Doctor Zhivago.
She received her second Golden Globe nomination for Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), and later played her grandmother in the biopic, Chaplin (1992) for which she received her third Golden Globe nomination.
“We would just hang around that Butler Arms Hotel,” she recalls of her holidays in Waterville. “It was a very strange, beautiful, very eclectic group of people that were there.
“My father was fascinated with the people in the hotel, because they were all the sort of people that he really admired – doctors, engineers – they were kind of high-class people, and he always, I think, had a complex about not having an education.
“These people obviously recognised him and adored him and admired him, and felt very at home there.”
Chaplin: The Waterville Picture is RTÉ One tonight (Tuesday May 29th) at 10.15pm
