Victoria Chaplin

Who is Victoria Chaplin?

Victoria Chaplin is an Anglo-American circus performer. She is the daughter of comedian Charlie Chaplin and his fourth wife, Oona O'Neill, and the granddaughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill.

Chaplin was born in the United States but grew up in Switzerland. As a teenager, she appeared as an extra in her father's last film, A Countess from Hong Kong. Her father also wanted her to star in the main role of a winged girl found from the Amazonian rainforest in his next planned film, The Freak, in 1969. However, the project was never filmed because of his declining health and because Chaplin eloped with the French actor Jean-Baptiste Thierrée.

Chaplin and Thierrée had first come into contact after he read about Chaplin's aspiration of becoming a circus clown in a magazine article of her father, and asked her to form a new type of circus with him. Soon after their elopement they briefly appeared as two clowns in Federico Fellini's The Clowns, and the next year performed for the first time with the contemporary circus Le Cirque Bonjour, which they had founded together, at Festival d'Avignon. In 1974, they founded a new, smaller circus, Le Cirque Imaginaire, which centered only on their, and occasionally their children's, performances, and from 1990 onwards have performed under the name Le Cirque Invisible.