Geraldine Chaplin

Dr Steven Rybin is Associate Professor of Film at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the author of several books including Geraldine Chaplin (2020), Gestures of Love: Romancing Performance in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2017), Michael Mann (2013) and Terence Malik and the Thought of Film (2011). He is editor of The Cinema of Hal Hartley (2016), Hamlet Lives in Hollywood (2017) and Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s (2022).

Steven Rybin has done us all a service by bringing Geraldine Chaplin's career and art so thoughtfully into view.　 Through a series of revelatory close readings, he traces her globe-spanning, seven-decade career, which encompassed turns in British, Spanish, French, Italian, Hollywood, and avant-garde cinemas and included career-defining roles in Doctor Zhivago and Nashville. Throughout, Rybin recognizes Chaplin as an avatar of film history: her earliest screen appearance came as a child extra in her father's Limelight; one of her latest saw her playing her own grandmother in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin. Framing Chaplin's career through its distinct echoes with that of her legendary father, Rybin enables us to see how Geraldine Chaplin both embraced and transcended that legacy to become a preeminent screen artist in her own right.

• List of figuresIntroduction – Into the Limelight Chapter One – The Kid: Geraldine Chaplin in the SixtiesChapter Two – The Great Dictator: Geraldine Chaplin in the Films of Carlos Saura Chapter Three – The Circus: Geraldine Chaplin in the Cinemas of Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph Chapter Four – A Woman of Paris: Geraldine Chaplin Across French Cinema Chapter Five – Modern Times: Geraldine Chaplin Across Contemporary Cinema