Hetty Kelly

Henrietta "Hetty" Kelly (1893 – October 1918[1]) was an Irish dancer and music hall performer, and the first love of movie comedian Charlie Chaplin.

Hetty Kelly

Chaplin met her in 1908 in London when they were both performing for impresario Fred Karno at the Streatham Empire. She was with a song and dance troupe, Bert Coutts' Yankee-Doodle Girls, and Chaplin was playing a drunk in 'Mumming Birds'. He was 19 and she was 15. He remembered her as "a slim gazelle, with a shapely oval face, a bewitching full mouth, and beautiful teeth". She came to be the female ideal in Chaplin's mind and he recreated her in some of the female leads in his movies. Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, written in 1964: "Although I had met her but five times, and scarcely any of our meetings had lasted longer than twenty minutes, that brief encounter affected me for a long time."

Hetty's father was a window-frame maker in Camberwell,[1] but her siblings both did well. Her sister, musical comedy actress Edith Kelly, married American millionaire Frank Jay Gould.[2] Her brother, Arthur, became an executive for United Artists, which Chaplin co-founded.[1] At the age of 21, Hetty married Lieutenant (later "Sir") Alan Edgar Horne (1889–1984) in August 1915.[1][3] Horne was a Lieutenant in the Surrey Yeomanry.[3] (In 1941 Horne succeeded his father to the Horne baronetcy of Shackleford, in Surrey.[3]) The couple lived at 5 Tilney Street, Mayfair, London.[1]

Hetty died in October 1918[1] in the Spanish flu epidemic that ravaged Europe in the wake of the First World War. Chaplin did not learn of her death until three years later in 1921 when Fred Karno informed him, on a visit to England.

Hetty Kelly was played by American actress Moira Kelly in the 1992 film Chaplin produced and directed by Richard Attenborough. Kelly also played Chaplin's fourth and last wife Oona O'Neill in the film.[4]