Chaplin, the oldest surviving child of film legend Charlie Chaplin, died at his Rancho Mirage home of complications following 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 a year old in a sensational divorce that made headlines.
Sydney Chaplin regularly recalled that he was a veteran of World War II before he really came to know his work-obsessed father.
“He was a strange man," 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, and relatively aimless, Chaplin was persuaded by a friend to try acting. In 1946, he co-founded the Circle Theater in Los Angeles that developed a reputation for quality productions.
His father eventually directed Chaplin in several stage projects. “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, Sydney told People. “He simply called me one day and said, 'I've written a new picture and I've written a role for you,' “ Chaplin said in 2003 in the Detroit Free Press.
Sydney Chaplin also appeared in “A Countess From Hong Kong," the 1967 film that was his father's last as a director.
On Broadway, Sydney 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," Chaplin later said of “Bells."
