Georgia Hale

Georgia Theodora Hale (June 25, 1900 — June 17, 1985) was an actress of the silent movie era.

Hale rose to film stardom in 1925 under the auspices of directors Josef von Sternberg in The Salvation Hunters and Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. Hale retired from acting in 1931 after appearing in about a dozen silent and sound films.

Hale’s 1995 memoir Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups is one of the few accounts that provide highly personal and professional insights into Hollywood directors Chaplin and von Sternberg.

Georgia Hale was born on June 25, 1900 to George Washington Hale and his spouse Laura Imbrie of St. Joseph, Missouri. She was the youngest of three daughters (Eugenia, b. 16 March 1896, Helen, b. 19 August 1898). Her father, preoccupied with his duties as a telephone company operations manager, provided the family with a middle-class income; her mother, an avid homemaker, was solely responsible for raising the girls. Hale reports that her father did not hide his disappointment that she had not been born the male heir he had hoped for. In Hale’s 1995 posthumously published memoir Charlie Chaplin: Intimate Close-Ups, her upbringing appears fraught with sibling rivalries, and by her own account, was not a nurturing or affectionate home environment.

The family moved to a suburb of Englewood, Illinois in early 1903, and where Hale would graduate from high school. In June 1918, her yearbook reports that Hale, in performing the role of Ralph Rackstraw in the Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera H. M. S. Pinafore, had "made her justly famous" on campus.

An aspiring singer, Hale attended a Chicago musical college in 1920, appearing in the Chicago Winter Follies - her first theatrical engagement. Hale had become infatuated with actor Charlie Chaplin’s screen persona while in her teens. In the summer of 1920, she reports in her memoir that she had a chance encounter with Charlie Chaplin on Michigan Boulevard, where they exchanged hellos.

In August 1922, Hale was selected among twenty contestants as winner of the Chicago “Queen of the Pageant” beauty contest. The event was attended by heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, as well as United States Attorney General Hubert Work of the Warren G. Harding administration, personally crowned “Miss Chicago.” Hale was presented with a $2500 cash prize and received offers to appear in films. In late 1922, she traveled to New York to begin her movie career.

Hale performed uncredited supporting roles in a number of features over the next several months. The only picture that has been positively identified among these is Enemies of Women (1923), starring Lionel Barrymore and directed by Alan Crosland. After a brief visit to her ailing mother in Chicago in the spring of 1923, Hale left for Hollywood, California.