Claire Bloom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Claire Bloom | |
|---|---|
| Born | 15 February 1931 London, England, UK |
Claire Bloom (born Patricia Claire Blume on February 15, 1931) is a British film and stage actress.
She was born in the North London suburb of Finchley, to Edward Blume (the son of Jewish immigrants, originally named Blumenthal, from Russia and Latvia) and Elizabeth Grew (a descendant of Jewish immigrants from Poland originally named Griewski).
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[edit] Career
After training at the Guildhall School and the Central School of Speech and Drama, Bloom made her debut on BBC radio programmes. She made her stage debut in 1946, when she was 15, with the Oxford Repertory Theatre.
[edit] Stage roles
Her London stage debut was in 1947 in the Christopher Fry play The Lady's Not For Burning; the following year, she received great acclaim for her portrayal of Ophelia in Hamlet, the first of many works by William Shakespeare that Bloom would appear in.
Bloom has appeared in a number of plays and theatrical works in both London and New York. Those works include Look Back In Anger, Rashomon, and Bloom's favorite role, that of Blanche in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. Bloom has also performed in a one woman show that included monologues from several of her stage performances.
[edit] Film roles
Bloom's first film role was in 1948, for the film The Blind Goddess. She was chosen by Charlie Chaplin in 1952 to appear in his film Limelight, which catapulted Bloom to stardom, and remains one of her most memorable roles.
She was subsequently featured in a number of "costume" roles in films sych as Alexander The Great, The Brothers Karamazov, The Buccaneer, and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm. Bloom also appeared in Laurence Olivier's Richard III, Ibsen's A Doll's House, as well as the films The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Look Back In Anger, both with Richard Burton.
In the 1960s she began to play more contemporary roles, including an unhinged housewife in The Chapman Report, a psychiatrist in the Oscar winning film Charly, and a lesbian in The Haunting. She also appeared in the 1989 Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Her most recent appearance in a Hollywood film was in the 1996 Sylvester Stallone film Daylight.
[edit] Television
Bloom has appeared in several films, series and miniseries for television, including playing First Lady Edith Wilson in Backstairs at the White House.She also appeared as Cathy in Wuthering Heights with Keith Michell as Heathcliffe. She also appeared as Lady Marchmain Brideshead Revisited, Shadowlands, and The Camomile Lawn. Her most recent appearance in a miniseries was in the 2006 version of The Ten Commandments.
On continuing television series, she has appeared on the New York-based Law & Order: Criminal Intent. From 1991 to 1993, she portrayed villainess Orlena Grimaldi on the daytime drama As The World Turns. She also had major roles in several of the BBC-Shakespeare Play television presentations and has led workshops on shakespearean performance practices.
[edit] Personal life and memoirs
Bloom was married three times. Her first marriage was in 1959 to actor Rod Steiger, whom she had met when they both performed in the play Rashomon. Their daughter, opera singer Anna Steiger, was born in 1960. Steiger and Bloom divorced in 1969.
In that same year, Bloom married producer Hillard Elkins. The marriage lasted three years and the couple divorced in 1972.
Bloom's third marriage was to writer Philip Roth in 1990; the couple divorced in 1995.
Bloom wrote two memoirs about her life and career. The first, Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress, was released in 1982 and was an in-depth look at her career and the film and stage roles she had portrayed.
Her second book, Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir, was published in 1996, and went into greater details about her personal life; she discussed not only her marriages but her romantic relationships with Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier.
The book created a stir when Bloom detailed the highly complicated relationship between her and Philip Roth during their marriage. The details Bloom shared were unflattering to Roth, and created a controversy regarding the true nature of their relationship. The character of Eve Frame in Roth's 1998 novel I Married a Communist is clearly intended as a retort. In the book, Frame is constantly bullied by her daughter, a professional harpist, and their relationship slowly ruins Frame's marriage to her third husband. She then destroys the reputation of her former husband by publishing her memoirs accusing him of being a communist spy.
