Geraldine Leigh Chaplin was born on July 31, 1944, in Santa Monica, California, the fourth child of actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, and the first child of his fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, whom he married in 1943. Charlie Chaplin was 55 when Geraldine Chaplin was born and Oona was 19 years old. Chaplin was the first of their eight children. Her paternal grandparents were English Charles Chaplin Sr. and Hannah Chaplin (born Hannah Harriet Pedlingham Hill), and her maternal grandparents were Nobel- and Pulitzer-Prize-winning American playwright Eugene O’Neill and English-born writer Agnes Boulton.

At 17 years of age, Chaplin decided to forgo college to pursue dance instead, and studied ballet for two years in England, including a period in 1961 at the Royal Ballet School. Chaplin then danced professionally for a year in Paris. Although a good dancer, she felt she had not trained from an early enough age to excel at it and so gave up ballet. Said Chaplin “I didn’t leave ballet, ballet left me”. It was a great disappointment to her.

In 1967, she made her Broadway debut in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Her performance was praised by Clive Barnes in a New York Times review, where he noted that Chaplin “acts with spirit and force… with a magnificently raw-voiced sincerity” giving a performance of “surprising power.”

In an interview with The New York Times in 1977, Chaplin cited that her career was going more successfully in Europe than in the United States. She complained that “I only seem to work with Altman here … I don’t have any offers in this country, none. Not even an interesting script to read. The only person who ever asks me is Altman—and James Ivory.”

In 1978, the Chaplin family were the victims of a failed extortion plot by kidnappers who had stolen the body of Charlie Chaplin. Geraldine Chaplin negotiated with the kidnappers, who had also threatened her infant son.

In 2006 Chaplin was awarded the gold medal by the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España—the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences—for her contribution to Spanish cinema.

Her second long-term relationship has been with Chilean cinematographer Patricio Castilla, whom she married in 2006, and with whom she has a daughter, Oona, an actress in British and Spanish films.

As of 2011, Chaplin maintains a home in Miami, Florida. She also spends time in residences between Madrid, Spain, and Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland (the latter near the former long-time home of her and her father).

In 2018, she starred in Red Land (Rosso Istria), Italian movie by Maximiliano Hernando Bruno based on Norma Cossetto and the foibe massacres.

2020 Britannia Season2, Episode 5, Queen Mother of Amena