Charles Coghlan was later raised in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire and Hull, Yorkshire and though originally groomed for a career in law he had chosen instead to be an actor whilst still in his teens.

Coghlan would remain with Prince of Wales over the next seven or eight seasons, playing leading roles such as Geoffrey Delamayn in Collins' Man and Wife and Harry Speadbrow in Gilbert's Sweethearts.

He made his Broadway debut on 12 September 1876, at the Fifth Avenue Theater, as Alfred Evelyn in Lord Lytton's Money and was an instant success.

[7] The next season Coghlan was engaged as the leading man at the Union Square Theater, where he played Jean Remind during the successful run of Augustus R. Cazauran's The Celebrated Case.

Rose explained that the manuscript was sent to a typist and at the end her brother signed it and added his Canadian address: "Charles Coghlan, Fortune's Bridge."

[5] When in 1893 Coghlan married nineteen-year-old Kühne Beveridge,[a] a promising sculptor and aspiring actress from a prominent Illinois family, questions arose about his former marital status.

[24] Nearly a year later the disposition of the body had yet to be decided and, in the interim, his casket was swept away from its resting place by a storm surge generated from the deadly Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

[27] Coghlan's coffin/remains was eventually found in January 1907[28] by a group of hunters who discovered it partially submerged in a marsh some nine miles from Galveston along the east coast of mainland Texas.

[29][30][31] Years after his death and the recovery of his body, a story arose that Coghlan's metal casket had been recovered in 1907, not far from his Prince Edward Island proper, by a group of Canadian fishermen in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, after drifting some two thousand miles along the East Coast of North America.

[37] According to his entry in Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of 1899: The words that were written in 1790 of his kinsman, the MacCoghlan, last Lord of Delvin-Ara, well describe Charles Coghlan: "He was a remarkably handsome man, gallant, eccentric, proud, satirical, hospitable in the extreme, and of expensive habits."

A contemporary American critic thus summed up his excellence as an actor in 1879: "It is to the complete and perfect forgetting of self in his performance that the high esteem in which Mr. Coghlan is held by the thinking audience is due.

He was the namesake of a song by Dutch symphonic black/horror metal band Carach Angren, who have also a music video released to showcase his untimely demise and events thereafter.