The creepy real life of the twins behind Orlando Bloom’s controversial new Hollywood film, their wild shared obsession with a neighbor… and the heartbreaking sacrifice from the sister left behind

Identical twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, famous around their hometown of York in northern England for their puzzling behavior, were always in sync. More than typical twins, it was as if, commented an observer, they were ‘drawn together by an invisible force.’

They didn’t just look alike, they dressed alike as mirror images of each other and talked almost in unison with strong Yorkshire accents. They even tried to walk in step, which happened often as they insisted on doing everything together. Their inseparability was only heightened by their mistrust of other people and of the wider world.

A look of worry permanently etched on their faces, they had to be able to see each other at all times and a moment’s separation was enough to make them hysterical. Everything they did, they did simultaneously, from eating – they had to have identically sized portions and would pick up a knife or fork precisely together – to cleaning their teeth.

The extraordinary life of identical twins Freda and Greta Chaplin first attracted the world’s stunned attention after they both developed an obsessive crush on the same man, a truck driver who lived next door.

Sadly, for the object of their infatuation, Ken Iverson, their fixation on him – which wasn’t only verbal but physical as they would batter his car with their matching handbags as he tried to drive past – continued for 15 years during which they endlessly tried to follow him around.

When it became clear they had no intention of respecting the restraining order he had imposed on them, they were sentenced to prison for a month in 1981, when they were 38 and Iverson was 56. Prison officials generously broke their usual rules and allowed the twins to share a cell.

For the twins’ entire lives, psychiatrists and other mental health experts were baffled by the Chaplins’ behavior. It was suggested that in their pursuit of their entirely blameless neighbor, the unnervingly strange and scientifically unique sisters might be suffering from a rare psychosis, erotomania, in which the sufferer believes another person is infatuated with them when no such romantic relationship exists.

Now their astonishing existence has inspired a new feature film, Bucking Fastard, starring siblings Kate and Rooney Mara as twins who become infatuated with their neighbor, played by Orlando Bloom. The film has drawn mixed reviews but notably grabbed attention thanks to a strange threesome scene between the sisters and Bloom. He was ridiculed for describing the lurid three-in-a-bed shot – in which they entice him in unison saying, ‘We’d like to show you our inner cowgirl’ and then scatter flower petals over his body in bed – as ‘very sincere.’

The Mara sisters play Jean and Joan Holbrooke, Irish identical twins, who, according to the producers, are ‘so close to each other that they speak in unison, love the same man and have the same dreams… they even make the same slip of tongue in unison.’

Directed by the celebrated art house director Werner Herzog, Germany’s ‘wild man of cinema,’ the three-in-a-bed scenario never actually happened in the Chaplins’ reportedly chaste life, but there’s no doubt that in many other respects, the Holbrooke characters resemble the Chaplins.

Herzog said he met the actual Chaplin twins, both of whom are now dead, a few times. His movie is called Bucking Fastard after a verbal slip the twins made simultaneously when they were in court for tormenting their neighbor.

In real life, the Chaplins, who were inseparable until death, lived such secluded and unworldly lives that it’s difficult to imagine either being capable of having a sexual relationship. They kept their stuffed toys – pairs of identical ones, naturally – well into middle age along with their matching wardrobes of smart but old-fashioned clothes.

They were born in 1943 in Tang Hall, a working-class neighborhood in the small city of York where they lived with their parents, James and Elsie Chaplin, in public housing. Like all true identical twins, they were biologically exactly the same.

The twins were reportedly fairly normal in early childhood – although they would later say that their mother did her best to push them together, dressing them identically and making them share the few toys they had.

Around the age of 11, they changed and became ever more dependent on each other and isolated from everybody else. They would scream if teachers tried to split them up.

They left school at 15 and became virtual recluses, staying all day in their bedroom. It was about this time that they started to synchronize their speech. Their parents found them increasingly unbearable to have under their roof because of their obsessive behavior, which included continually turning water taps on and off in the house. 

As they became adults, their mother, they said, warned them to stick to each other and have nothing to do with any men. Aware that they were regarded as freaks, they avoided most people, only increasing their isolation.

In a trailer for the new movie, the twins speak entirely together, but the Chaplins rarely did that. More confusingly for anyone trying to follow what they were saying, they tended to speak the same words just an instant apart – although too quickly for it to have merely been a case of one predicting what the other was going to say.

Everything in their lives had to be identical down to the last details and they were continually glancing at what the other was doing to make sure it was. Often, they would move at glacial speed as they tried to keep in sync with each other and, if ever separated by more than a few feet, they would get flustered and confused, no longer knowing where they were going or what they were doing.

If the phone rang, both would speak to the caller in turn, repeating what the other had said. If they were using a vacuum cleaner, both would have to cling on to it as they pushed it across the floor.

When they needed to get ready to go out, they avoided crowds, aware that people would stare at them, they didn’t need to look into a mirror, instead staring at each other, which revealed exactly how they looked.

Some believed the fact that they were forced together so much in childhood meant that they came to be entirely dependent on each other rather than developing their own, separate personalities.

Were they, as they were sometimes described, ‘two people trapped in one mind?’ They conceded that ‘sometimes’ they knew what the other was going to say.

Long into middle age, they had a tendency to behave like naughty children, which observers put down primarily to their loneliness and boredom.

They could turn nasty, throwing glass milk bottles at people who had offended them and swearing like troopers. While they preferred not to admit it, the twins sometimes turned on each other, leaving scratch marks on their faces where they had come to blows.

In York, they were at one time sectioned under the Mental Health Act as it was suspected they were suffering from schizophrenia. However, apart from their suspected erotomania there was no real evidence that they had any form of psychosis known at the time.

Eventually, their parents insisted the twins move out of the family home and they lived in a psychiatric institution for several years before moving on to a succession of semi-sheltered homes and hostels.

In the mid-1980s, a retired engineer named Jack Davenport read about their plight and took pity on them, persuading the twins, by then in their forties, to live in a large but dilapidated old house he owned in the East End of London. Of course, they shared a large double bed.

Davenport, whose role in their lives is replaced in the new movie by a sympathetic social worker played by Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, became about their only close friend. He believed they had the mental age of a 13-year-old – hence their propensity for crushes, prankish behavior and general uselessness at looking after themselves.

Moving to London opened up a vacancy in their lives for a new man to become the focus of their obsessive attention.

It was filled by the owner of a small clothing factory next door to their new home, a kind-hearted man who remained remarkably patient with them for all the stand-up rows that ensued, who they would go and bother in his workplace every day like clockwork. Desperate to get his attention, they treated him the same way as they treated truck driver Ken Iverson in earlier years – lobbing bottles at him and hitting his vehicle so hard with their handbags they left dents.

When one of two documentary crews who won the twins’ wavering trust sufficiently to allow them to be filmed once recorded the pair being turfed out of the factory by their reluctant boyfriend, they screamed hysterically for the journalists to call the police.

A psychiatrist who spent time with the twins believed they could be suffering another rare mental condition, known as folie a deux, or joint madness between two people. He also considered the possibility that one of them was bending the other to her demented will, but while they certainly always kept careful watch on what the other was doing, neither of them was the obvious ringleader, he said.

That didn’t mean, however, that they had identical personalities. ‘They’re definitely different personalities although they won’t admit this,’ Davenport told a 1987 documentary, A Pair of One, directed by Juliet Darling, about the twins.

‘Greta is the softer and more sensitive one. Freda is the one who tends to dominate her sister and the one who loses her temper quicker,’ he said.

Although they insisted that they rarely disagreed, they occasionally left scratch marks on each other from fighting.

Many people who crossed their path found Freda and Greta maddening but their friend Davenport was far more sympathetic.

‘They just want friendship, love and understanding and these things they didn’t get from most of the places they went to,’ he said in 1987.

Their life was generally one of strict routines and one that they always observed was a rail trip up to York every two or three weeks to visit the family home still occupied by their parents. Aware their parents wouldn’t allow them inside the house, they would stand outside – sometimes for hours – hoping to glimpse them inside. The parents would never acknowledge the twins’ presence outside and never talked to the media about their children.

The twins had expressed a desire to return to York and live in the old family home after their parents died and they finally did so in the 1990s. When Greta died of cancer aged 64 in 2007, her sister was reportedly heartbroken, finding comfort in her pets, and visiting her sister’s grave in a local cemetery every day.

According to the York Press newspaper, Freda felt so guilty that she was still alive that she spent the rest of her life denying herself anything she regarded as a luxury – even a comfortable soft chair – on the grounds that her sister couldn’t enjoy it with her.

When she, too, passed on 13 years later in 2020 also succumbing to cancer, she was buried next to her sister – a request that surely surprised nobody.