3. Charlie Chaplin Was Totally Obsessed With Young Girls
Creepiness Factor: 9/10 Charlie Chaplin: cinematic pioneer, director, and arguably the greatest actor the cinema has ever had. Many of his films - City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator - are deemed to be some of the finest ever produced, and Chaplin himself is lauded as an icon to this very day. What doesn't get talked about quite as often as his films, though, is his reputation as a womaniser... that, and his apparent strange, creepy obsession with underage girls. "Obsession" really is the key word here, because Chaplin really did have a weird lust for young females. He boasted that he slept with over 2,000 woman over the course of his life, but a large number of these girls were of questionable ages when he pursued them. Chaplin wasn't exactly discreet about any of this, though: he married sixteen-year-old "child" actress Mildred Harris in 1918. At the time, he was 29. After they divorced, Chaplin went for an even younger actress named Lita Grey, who was only 15-years-old. Later on, he would have an affair with actress Paulette Goddard, who - presumably knowing that he liked younger women - told Chaplin she was just 17 when she was actually 22. And those are just the women that we know about. It's not clear how many of the 2,000 females that Chaplin slept with over the years were actually age appropriate...
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
