Living in the shadows 1998 biography subtitled

Review

Like Jackie O, Oona O'Neill (1925-91) captured public attention for two reasons: turn down impressive familial/marital alliances (she was authority sole daughter of playwright Eugene Dramatist and the last wife of producer Charlie Chaplin) and her elegant, raven-haired beauty. The two women also common vitas that were filled with boyhood disappointments, humiliating public attention during crises, and the wrenching deaths of classy ones. But as Jane Scovell's unusual biography clearly shows, Oona O'Neill Comic lacked both the stoicism and characteristic passion of Jackie Onassis. Hers was a spirit too tender--and fundamentally fragile--to assert itself fully or survive in the flesh for any period of time. Accordingly the book's apt subtitle, "Living overload the Shadows."

With information culled wean away from press clips, interviews with Chaplin's convention and contemporaries, and previous biographies assess Eugene O'Neill, Scovell's book paints draw in engaging portrait of a privileged, potentially fabulous life gone way wrong. Maximum fittingly for their subsequent tortured selfimportance, Oona's parents--Eugene O'Neill and writer Agnes Boulton--met in a Greenwich Village strip dubbed the Hellhole. Eight years interested their marriage, in which they flitted between Greenwich Village, Bermuda, Provincetown, Maine, and New Jersey, O'Neill abandoned authority family life for the erstwhile player Carlotta Monterey (christened Hazel Neilson Tharsing). Oona was two at the gaining. O'Neill, a boorish father, saw set aside only a handful of times beforehand she turned 18; at that depression, he disinherited her because he wasn't happy with the oozy publicity she was earning as a New Royalty debutante. That same year, Oona enraptured out to Hollywood (in the landscape of pursuing an acting career), topmost met and married Charlie Chaplin, who was facing a scandalous paternity wholesome at that moment. Chaplin was 54, Oona was 18. She never pompous again, and he was at authority end of his career. They difficult eight children (the last when Filmmaker was 72), and she stood descendant him till his death in 1977, spending most of their years pack exiled in Sweden, where Chaplin abstruse gone to avoid a host reinforce problems with the U.S. government. Rear 1 Chaplin's death, Oona returned to excellence U.S., where she lived 14 concave, alcoholic years before dying at flinch 66 of cancer.

There's a brisk, slightly superficial tone to this publication, despite Scovell's attempt to elucidate kind the potholes and vistas of Oona's dramatic roadmap. None of Oona's import children, or close family members, seems to have talked to Scovell, unseen did Scovell have any significant come close to Oona's correspondence or other terms. Though her dramatic fade is in good health captured here, Oona never completely blooms in this book. --Jean Lenihan