In 1954, she renounced her United States citizenship and became a British subject. It was a decisive act, consistent with the pattern of the marriage: she aligned herself completely with Chaplin’s situation, including his deliberate separation from the country that had driven him out.
At the Manoir de Ban, she managed a large household that included eight children born over eighteen years. The youngest, Christopher, was born in 1962, when Oona was thirty-seven and Chaplin was seventy-two. By the time of Chaplin’s death in 1977, Christopher was fifteen. Annette was eighteen. The older children — Geraldine, Michael, Josephine, Victoria, and Eugene — had made independent lives, though several had settled in Europe and maintained close ties.
Oona was also her husband’s collaborator in a practical sense. She helped manage correspondence, participated in business decisions related to his archive and the reissues of his films, and was present throughout the final years of his life when his health was declining and he could no longer travel freely. When he was knighted in 1975, she was at the ceremony.
Chaplin died on Christmas morning. He was buried on December 27. What followed for Oona was the ordinary bereavement of a widow managing a large family estate, dealing with legal and financial affairs, and adjusting to the sudden absence of a husband who had been the center of the family’s life for thirty-four years. The children gathered. The funeral was attended by family and close friends. The press covered the death extensively.
Sixty-eight days after the burial, the telephone at the Manoir de Ban rang with a ransom demand for her husband’s coffin.