Chaplin's muse, Hollywood's most spirited leading lady, and a woman who survived — and outlasted — every system that tried to constrain her. Vivacious, independent, and criminally underestimated.
Portrait · Paulette Goddard
Born Pauline Marion Levy on June 3, 1910, in Great Neck, New York, she began as a Ziegfeld Girl in her teens, adopting the stage name Paulette Goddard and establishing herself in Broadway chorus lines before Hollywood. Her first marriage, at sixteen, to a wealthy lumber heir, ended in divorce but provided the financial independence she would maintain — and fiercely protect — for the rest of her life.
Her relationship and secret marriage to Charlie Chaplin (c. 1936) brought her the roles that defined her career. As the Gamine in Modern Times (1936), she matched Chaplin's physical comedy beat for beat, her dark eyes and irrepressible energy providing the warmth the film needed. In The Great Dictator (1940), she was the Jewish girl whose faith in humanity closes the film.
She narrowly lost the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind — largely due to questions about whether she and Chaplin were actually married — and the slight stung, but she moved on with characteristic pragmatism, becoming one of Paramount's top box-office draws through the early 1940s.
Her later marriages included actor Burgess Meredith and novelist Erich Maria Remarque, with whom she spent her final decades in Europe. She died in Ronco sopra Ascona, Switzerland, in 1990, leaving most of her considerable art collection and estate to New York University.
As the Gamine, an orphan girl surviving on the streets, Goddard brings warmth, wit, and an irrepressible physicality that holds its own against Chaplin's genius. She is not his ornament — she is his equal.
Against Chaplin's double performance as both the Dictator and the Jewish Barber, Goddard provides the film's moral center — earnest, compassionate, and grounded. Her Hannah is the reason the film's famous ending works.
Goddard earned her Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress playing Kansas, a nurse whose grief drives her toward reckless heroism. It remains one of her most dramatically substantial performances.
A prestige Paramount production in which DeMille trusted Goddard as the linchpin of the story. Her Loxi Claiborne is spirited, resourceful, and entirely in command of every scene she inhabits.
I have always been independent. That is not going to change just because someone thinks I should be otherwise.
Paulette Goddard's legacy is inseparable from the question of what she might have become had she won the role of Scarlett O'Hara — a role she almost certainly deserved. Instead, the snub sent her to Paramount, where she had a highly successful run, before she chose Europe over the long decline of the studio system.
She left her estate — estimated at $20 million, including art by Renoir, Modigliani, and others — almost entirely to New York University, endowing the Erich Maria Remarque Institute and supporting the arts in ways that outlasted the memory of any single performance. It was a fitting end for a woman who always played a longer game than Hollywood expected.