A True Dedication

Geraldine Chaplin began getting sympathy calls from friends after Mother Teresa died last month.

Though the daughter of the legendary Charlie Chaplin never met the beloved humanitarian, she plays the Catholic nun in the Family Channel movie, “Mother Teresa: In the Name of God’s Poor,” which airs Sunday.

“It was very strange,” Chaplin says over the phone from her summer home in Switzerland. “People started to phone me up and would say, ‘I don’t know why I am phoning you, but Mother Teresa’s dead.’ ”

The actress is still in a state of disbelief over the nun’s death. She says she found a quote from Bernard Shaw that sums up her feelings about Mother Teresa’s passing at age 87.

Though it was written about a man, Chaplin has put a feminine twist to the phrase: “ ‘You can lose a woman like that by your own death, but not by her’s.’ I feel that very much. Princess Diana died and I really feel she’s dead. She is gone. But I don’t feel that Mother Teresa has gone. She is so great. You can only lose her through your own death.”

Chaplin hopes the cable drama, which was shot in Sri Lanka, will be seen as a tribute to the Albanian-born missionary who dedicated her life to help the world’s poor. Still, she is grateful that there has been a “little bit of time [after her death] before it’s shown, because otherwise it would be obscene.”

The Family Channel didn’t rush the film onto its schedule because Mother Teresa died. The date was selected months ago, and the cable network will be running a short statement at the outset: “This film was prepared prior to Mother Teresa’s death on Sept. 5, 1997. The Family Channel presents this film as a tribute to the life and work of this esteemed and great humanitarian.”

Director Kevin Connor (“Master of the Game”) says that Chaplin, who made her film debut in her father’s 1952 classic “Limelight,” was the only choice to play Mother Teresa.

“She is tiny and very frail-looking, which is what you think about with Mother Teresa,” he says. “Geraldine has a very lean face. She’s like a bird. She just fitted the image.”

Chaplin, a veteran of such films as “Doctor Zhivago” and “Remember My Name,” was everything Connor hoped for and more. “We were working in very difficult places, in slums and smelly streets,” Connor recalls. “She was unbelievable. It was a director’s dream. She is right by the camera, word perfect.”

Two months before Mother Teresa’s death, Chaplin was visiting Los Angeles to talk about the movie. Despite a severe case of jet lag, the whippet-slim, engaging, 53-year-old actress was in great spirits.

Chaplin, who spent eight years attending Catholic girls’ schools, envisions the film as a love story between Mother Teresa and God. “I felt it was a like a love triangle between her and God in the spiritual way. The physical aspect of this love are the lepers and the unwanted and the beggars. When she touches them she touches Christ’s body--that’s the way she sees it.”

Mother Teresa marks the second time Chaplin has played a real figure. Five years ago, she portrayed her own grandmother in Richard Attenborough’s lavish biopic “Chaplin.”

But because her grandmother wasn’t famous, she explains, “It wasn’t so much of a challenge. She had died in the ‘20s.” That wasn’t the case with the diminutive Mother Teresa. “Everyone knows that face. Everyone knows the gestures. Everyone knows the voice. So that was really tough. The only liberation for me was playing her at a time when no one knows what she looked like--when she was 37, 38, 39 and 40.”

“Mother Teresa,” which also stars William Katt and Keene Curtis, chronicles the life of the Catholic nun who, as a sister of Loreto, began teaching at a convent school in Calcutta in the 1940s. After witnessing the extreme poverty, she experienced a “call within a call” and received permission from the Church to leave the convent to work with the city’s poor.

In 1950, the Vatican recognized Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity as an official religious community within the Archdiocese of Calcutta, and in 1979 she received the Noble Peace Prize.

(Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charities has not authorized the Family Channel movie. Despite the fact that one of the writers, Dominque Lapierre, says he had a 1982 contract with Mother Teresa authorizing the film, the order denied three months ago that she had ever approved the script.)

Prior to filming “Mother Teresa,” Chaplin watched numerous documentaries on the nun and spent much of her free time listening to audio tapes to get the accent perfect.

“It’s Albanian passed through Ireland, which is where she learned English,” she explains. “But it’s mostly Albanian and there is a Bengali lilt to it.”

Chaplin found it heartbreaking to work with the extras, who were all residents of the slums.

“In a lot of scenes which were in a hospital, these people thought they were being brought into hospital for real,” says Chaplin, who adds that all the extras were well-fed for their work.

“They would hold on to me and say, ‘Just don’t cut my leg off.’ One had to become Mother Teresa to take away these people’s fears. There were a lot of moving moments like that.”

Chaplin hopes the film makes viewers stop the next time they see a homeless person on the street and “maybe touch them and say ‘Hello’--more than just giving a piece of money. Also, if someone is crying, you can put your arm around him--tiny little symbols that are really very easy. The whole society doesn’t have to be transformed.”

“Mother Teresa: In the Name of God’s Poor” airs Sunday at 7 p.m. on the Family Channel.