Sydney Chaplin, stage actor and son of film legend; at 82

Sydney Chaplin was on hand for the issuance of the US Postal Service's commemorative stamp of his father, Charlie Chaplin. Sydney Chaplin was a Tony Award-winning actor. (US Postal Service via Associated Press)

LOS ANGELES - Sydney Chaplin, an actor who experienced his greatest success on stage, earning a Tony Award for starring in the 1950s musical "Bells Are Ringing," died Tuesday. He was 82.

Mr. Chaplin, the oldest surviving child of film legend Charlie Chaplin, died at his Rancho Mirage home of complications after a stroke, said Jerry Bodie, a longtime friend.

He was the second son of Charlie Chaplin and his second wife, Lita Grey, an ingenue who married the movie giant when she was 16 and he was 35. Their marriage ended when Sydney was 1 year old in a sensational divorce that made headlines.

Mr. Chaplin said that he was a veteran of World War II before he really came to know his work-obsessed movie-star father.

"He was a strange man," Mr. Chaplin told People magazine in 1989. "He had great difficulty expressing his feelings to me, which was odd because he expressed emotion on screen so marvelously."

Discharged from the Army, Mr. Chaplin was persuaded by a friend to try acting. In 1946, he cofounded the Circle Theater in Los Angeles.

"Once my father saw I was taking this acting stuff seriously, he gave me my first movie job, as the young composer in 'Limelight,' " a 1952 film, Mr. Chaplin told People.

"He simply called me one day and said, 'I've written a new picture and I've written a role for you,' " he said in 2003 in the Detroit Free Press.

Mr. Chaplin also appeared in "A Countess From Hong Kong," the 1967 film that was his father's last as a director.

On Broadway, Mr. Chaplin broke through in 1956 in the hit Broadway show "Bells Are Ringing" after actress Judy Holliday invited him to try out. She said "that Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Jule Styne had written a musical for her and they all thought I'd be perfect for the male lead," he said.

He auditioned as many as 15 times before landing the part of Jeff Moss, who falls in love with the switchboard operator, played by Holliday.

His other major Broadway success came in the original production of "Funny Girl" opposite Barbra Streisand. He played the gangster boyfriend Nick Arnstein to Streisand's Fanny Brice. Both actors received Tony nominations for their performances in the musical - the last of his five roles on Broadway - but feuded, and he left the show.

Sydney Earl Chaplin was named for his father's older half-brother, who helped launch Charlie Chaplin's career. He grew up living in Beverly Hills with his mother. On weekends, he and his older brother, Charlie Jr., would visit his father and his third wife, actress Paulette Goddard.

His film and television career stretched to the late 1970s, and he appeared in more than 35 projects. He had matinee-idol looks and often ended up in romances with his costars.

At 34, he married Noelle Adam, a French dancer and actress with whom he had his only child, Stephan, who has acted in French films. The marriage ended after eight years.

His father's fourth marriage, in 1943, to Oona O'Neill, gave him eight half-siblings and a stepmother who was his age.

When Charlie Chaplin died in 1977, he left his fortune of more than $100 million to his widow. His eldest child, Sydney's older brother, Charlie, had died in 1968 at age 42 of complications related to alcohol abuse. His father was afraid that his only remaining son would fritter away any inherited money, Mr. Chaplin recalled.

But Oona gave him the $500,000 he needed to open a bistro in the late 1980s called Chaplin's in Palm Springs. The restaurant was a celebrity hangout where Mr. Chaplin held court until it closed in the early 1990s, Brodie said.

Mr. Chaplin also leaves Margaret Beebe Chaplin, whom he married in 1998; actress Geraldine Chaplin and seven other half-siblings; and a granddaughter.