Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill by Miranda Seymour

However, Charlie Chaplin, the most famous man in the world, spotted with unhesitating clarity that the sensationally beautiful young woman beside him, squinting at the athletes in the ring, must be his next leading lady.

He leaned towards Virginia and offered her the part of the blind flower-seller in City Lights. After 342 takes, she proved that his choice had been perfect.

She distinguished herself as Chaplin's only leading lady not to sleep with him, yet romance and laughter remained the two tenets of Virginia's life, although happiness initially evaded her.

Three out of her four marriages brought three miscarriages. A Chicago lawyer (Irving Adler) provided an escape from a humble upbringing. A world-famous movie star (Cary Grant) helped launch her into the celebrity-conscious public eye.

A British Lord ( Jersey) and his exquisite Adam stately home at Osterley Park (a house so grand that 12 men were involved in the production of His Lordship's breakfast boiled egg) gave Virginia a cut-glass entrée into British upper-class society.

But it took three divorces, an exotic affair with the Maharajah of Jaipur (complete with enough jewelled rings to render Virginia's elegant knuckles invisible) and several other flings with leading Hollywood heart-throbs before she found happiness.

Finally Florian Martini, a Polish cowboy and movie-mad airman, persuaded her to retire from transatlantic society and marry him, grow avocados and reminisce.

Miranda Seymour fell almost unconditionally and unapologetically for the gorgeous, charismatic Virginia while watching her in her most famous film role (in fact the only one of any distinction in her short movie career).

With fantastic biographer's luck, she discovered that the ageing actress had, before her death in 1996, dictated her life story from the propped pillows of her Californian bed into a family friend's tape machine.

Seymour's exceptional gift for delivering visually atmospheric scenes never fails her, whether she is describing the bleak Chicago of the Twenties, the hedonism of Hollywood at its glittery zenith, the unchallenged sexual laxity at the court of the Maharajah of Jaipur or the tedious schoolboy pranks of the British upper classes in the Thirties and their jokey habit of tying rotting kippers to the exhausts of their gleaming Bentleys.

Perhaps it is only Chaplin's girl herself, the leading lady of Seymour's drama, who lets the show down slightly by bearing an irritating resemblance to the chocolate-boxy heroines of the silent movies that launched her.

This was a woman adored so excessively that, despite the Maharajah's adulation, it was the semi-jilted Maharini who loved her own rival better than anyone else in the world.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

In 1931, City Lights introduced Charlie Chaplin's new female star to the world. The film - defiantly silent in the age of talkies - was an immediate and international hit. The actress who played the romantic lead had never been on screen or stage before. Chaplin's film turned her into the most famous girl in the world. And, like Rhett Butler, the most famous girl in the world didn't give a damn. Virginia Cherrill was the beautiful daughter of an Illinois rancher, who ran away to live through some of Hollywood's wildest years. She was the adoring first wife who broke Cary Grant's heart when she left him; who turned down the gloriously eligible Maharajah of Jaipur to befriend his wife and rescue her from purdah. Virginia Cherrill presided, during the thirties, over one of England's loveliest houses, as the Countess of Jersey. Everybody sought her friendship. All that eluded her was love. And when she found it, she gave up all she had to marry a handsome and penniless Polish flying ace, whose dream it was to become a cowboy. In this glorious, and undiscovered story of Hollywood, international high society, wartime drama and romance, Miranda Seymour works from unpublished sources to recapture the personality of a woman so vividly enchanting that none could resist her. This is the story of Cinderalla in reverse: of the poor girl who won everything - and gave up all for love. Breathtakingly romantic, exquisitely written, this is the stuff that dreams are made of ...