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| Jeffrey Vance Collection |
Jeffrey Vance Collection |
Hannah Hill and Charlie Chaplin Sr . were aspiring adolescent actors when they met and fell in love while touring in the road show company of Shamus O’Brien in 1881. The two dreamers--Cockney-born teenagers--both came form working-class families and hoped to become famous music hall stars.
Sixteen-year-old Hannah’s chosen stage name Lillie Harley echoed that of her idol Lillie Langtry, the glamorous actress who parlayed her stage career into an affair with The Prince of Wales (whom she playfully addressed as “Bertie”). Langtry’s career proved that commoners and kings could and did freely meet and mingle: Hannah Hill’s fondest hope for herself.
A hopeful young actress with grand ambitions, Hannah fancied herself a future royal consort. She identified both with Nell Gwyn (the Cockney-born actress and mistress of Charles II) and Josephine de Beauharnais (who employed her seductive feminine wiles to conquer Napoleon). Hannah’s romantic fantasies inspired her to tell her impressionable young son, Charlie, that his namesake father, Charlie Chaplin Sr. had been the spitting image of Napoleon when they first met and fell in love.
“Mother was a soubrette on the variety stage, a mignonne in her late twenties, with fair complexion, violet-blue eyes and long light-brown hair that she could sit upon. Though she was not an exceptional beauty, we thought her divine-looking…she was dainty, attractive and had compelling charm,” Chaplin recalled [1964.]
In addition to being Hannah’s dark, brooding and moody version of Napoleon, 18-year-old Charlie Sr. had a fine light baritone voice and would go on to have a successful career playing the stage role of handsome, sartorially elegant men-about-town who were would-be ladykillers.
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