10 Golden Age Scandals Hollywood Wants You To Forget

Behind Charlie Chaplin’s comically unassuming onscreen persona was actually one of silent era Hollywood’s biggest players. Not only did Chaplin, at his own admission, have an estimated 2,000 notches on his bedpost, he was also reportedly one of the earliest pioneers of the casting couch method when it came to auditioning his female co-stars. His scandalous behaviour extended to very young women too and he took not one, not two, but three teenage brides.

Seventeen-year-old child actress Mildred Harris was 12 years Chaplin’s junior when she became his first wife in 1918. The union ended when divorce beckoned just two years later, and his second marriage in 1924 spurred on by an out of wedlock pregnancy to 16-year-old Lita Grey featured an even bigger age gap.

His third wife Paulette Goddard was practically a spinster by Chaplin’s standards when they wed in her mid-twenties, but proving that a leopard really never does change its spots his fourth and final wife Oona O’Neill was just eighteen when she married a 54-year-old Chaplin. Their union surpassed his past short-lived marriages though and lasted until his death in 1977.

Oh, and he was rumoured to be a communist and refused re-entry to the US in the early 1950s because of his political views but that’s another story.