Patricia Claire Bloom (born 15 February 1931) is an English actress. She is known for leading roles on stage and screen and has received two BAFTA Awards and an Emmy award as well as nominations for a Grammy Award and a Tony Award. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to drama.
After a childhood spent in various places in England and Florida, Bloom studied drama in London. She debuted on the London stage when she was sixteen and took roles in various Shakespeare plays. They included Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia alongside Richard Burton. She rose to prominence playing leading roles in stage productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, A Doll's House, and Long Day's Journey into Night. She made her Broadway debut in the play Richard II (1956). She received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play nomination for her role in Electra (1999).
Bloom made her film debut in The Blind Goddess (1948). Her breakthrough came with a leading role acting opposite Charlie Chaplin in Limelight (1952) for which she won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She went on to act in films such as Richard III (1955), Alexander the Great (1956), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), The Haunting (1963), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965), Charly (1968), A Doll's House (1973), Clash of the Titans (1981), and Shadowlands (1985). For the latter she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress. She later acted in the Woody Allen films Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and portrayed Queen Mary in historical drama The King's Speech (2010).
During her film career, she has starred alongside numerous major actors, including Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson, Yul Brynner, George C. Scott, James Mason, Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Rod Steiger and Jerry Lewis.
Early life and education
left|thumb|170px|Bloom in [[The Brothers Karamazov (1958 film)|The Brothers Karamazov (1958)]]
Bloom was born on 15 February 1931 as Patricia Claire Blume in Finchley, then part of Middlesex (now a suburb of north London), the daughter of Elizabeth (née Grew) and Edward Max Blume, a "not very successful" salesman. Her paternal grandparents, originally named Blumenthal, as well as her maternal grandparents, originally named Gravitzky, were Jewish emigrants from Byten in the Grodno region of Russia, now in Belarus, Eastern Europe.
Bloom's education was "somewhat haphazard"; she was sent to the independent Badminton School in Bristol, but when her father encountered financial difficulties the family relocated to Cornwall, where she attended the local village school. She later studied stage acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London,
After the Luftwaffe began bombing London during the Blitz in 1940 her family had a number of narrow escapes as bombs dropped close to their home. While their father remained in England, she and her brother John went with their mother to the United States, where she spent a year living in Florida with a paternal uncle's family; during this time her mother worked in her aunt's dress shop, "but she proved to be a dreadful saleswoman". She recalls, "It was 1941; I was ten, John was nearly six. We were to sail from Glasgow in a convoy, on a ship that was evacuating children." During her year's stay in Florida, she was asked by the British War Relief Society to help raise money by entertaining at various benefits, which she then did for a number of weeks. "Thus I broke into show business singing", she writes.
Her London stage debut was in 1947 in the Christopher Fry play The Lady's Not For Burning, which starred Sir John Gielgud and Pamela Brown and featured a young Richard Burton. It also played on Broadway in New York City. It was during the rehearsals for the play that Burton and Bloom began a long love affair. The following year she received acclaim for her portrayal of Ophelia in Hamlet, starring Burton. Although Burton was at that time married to Sybil Christopher, fellow actor and friend of Burton, Stanley Baker, seeing how attracted he was to Bloom, commented that he "thought that this might be the time when Rich actually left Sybil." Of her Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1957), critic Kenneth Tynan stated it was the best he had ever seen. She trained at the Rank Organisation's charm school but did not stay with that company for long. Her international screen debut came in the 1952 film Limelight, when she was chosen by Charlie Chaplin, who also directed, to co-star alongside him. The film catapulted Bloom to stardom.
The film had personal meaning for Chaplin as it contained numerous references to his life and family: the theatre where he and Bloom performed in the film was the same theatre where his mother gave her last performance; Bloom was directed by Chaplin to wear dresses similar to those his mother used to wear; Chaplin's sons and his half-brother all had parts. Bloom states that she felt one of the reasons she got the part was because she closely resembled his young wife, Oona O'Neill.
thumb|right|Claire Bloom as [[Barsine, with Richard Burton as Alexander, in Alexander the Great (1956)]]
She was subsequently featured in a number of "costume" roles in films such as Alexander the Great (1956), The Buccaneer (1958), Bloom also appeared in Laurence Olivier's film version of Richard III (1955), in which she played Lady Anne, as well as the films Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), both with Richard Burton. In a 2002 interview with Michael Shelden, Bloom said of Burton, "He had it all: intelligence, physical beauty, an incredible voice. There was no one else like him. When we were at the Old Vic, he proved that a working-class actor could make it, and I was proud of him. I thought he set a great example in a society that was, and still is, so preoccupied with class and accent."
1970–1989: Theatre roles and acclaim
thumb|left|170px|In Broadway stage play Hedda Gabler, 1971
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; 'Duel of Angels' (by Jean Giraudoux), co-starring with Vivien Leigh, in 1958; and Bloom's favourite role, that of Blanche DuBois, in a revival of the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire, which played in London in 1974. Critic Clive Barnes described the play as a "notable example of what the classic revival should be – well groomed, but thoughtful, expressive, illuminating." Another critic writes that Bloom's portrayal of Blanche featured "remarkable layers of vitality and tenderness", and playwright Williams stated, "I declare myself absolutely wild about Claire Bloom." She also starred in the 1976 Broadway revival of The Innocents. In the 1960s she began to play more contemporary roles, including an unhinged housewife in The Chapman Report, and Theodora in The Haunting. and playing Cathy in Wuthering Heights with Keith Michell as Heathcliff (1962). She also appeared as First Lady Edith Wilson in Backstairs at the White House (1979); as Joy Gresham, the wife of C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands for which she received the BAFTA Award as Best Actress (1985). Later appearances in films included her portrayal of Queen Mary in the 2010 Oscar winning British film The King's Speech and her portrayal of Eva Rose opposite Jerry Lewis in the 2016 film Max Rose. In television she acted in The Mirror Crack'd, the last of the BBC Miss Marple adaptations in 1992; and as the older Sophy in the serial The Camomile Lawn (1992) on Britain's Channel 4. Recent mini-series work includes The Ten Commandments (2006) and Summer of Rockets. and has led workshops on Shakespearean performance practices. In December 2006, she appeared on the London stage in Arthur Allan Seidelman's production of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks by Richard Alfieri, a two-hander in which she co-starred with Billy Zane. In October 2007, she appeared opposite Peter Bowles in Love Letters at the Théâtre Princesse Grace, Monte Carlo, directed by Marc Sinden, as part of his British Theatre Season, Monaco. In 2008, she guest starred in New Tricks as actress Helen Brownlow. The story concerned the murder of Brownlow's husband whilst they were in a play together.
In December 2009 and January 2010, she appeared in the two-part Doctor Who story "The End of Time" as a mysterious Time Lord credited only as "The Woman". Between 2005 and 2022, Bloom appeared in several episodes of ITV's Doc Martin as Margaret Ellingham, the estranged mother of the title character, Dr. Martin Ellingham; in the show's final episode she appears as a ghost. In 2015 she appeared as Matilda Stowe in ITV's Midsomer Murders episode 17.4, "A Vintage Murder". In 2019, she appeared as Aunt Mary in the Stephen Poliakoff BBC TV mini-series, Summer of Rockets.
Personal life
Marriages
Bloom has married three times. Their daughter is opera singer Anna Steiger. The marriage lasted for three years, and the couple divorced in 1972. Bloom's third marriage on 29 April 1990, was to writer Philip Roth, her longtime companion. They divorced in 1995. The book created a stir when Bloom described her former marriage to Roth. It offers what historian and Roth biographer Steven Zipperstein has characterized as a "bleak, acidic portrayal of their marriage . . . with most reviewers taking its accuracy for granted," although she herself would later admit to her inability to care for Roth when he suffered from "severe mental anguish so overwhelming that he admitted himself as a psychiatric patient to Silver Hill Hospital." Soon after, Roth wrote a "revenge novel", I Married a Communist (1998), in which the character of Eve Frame appeared to represent Bloom.
Acting credits
Film
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Year
! Title
! Role
! Notes
|-
| 1948
| The Blind Goddess
| Mary Dearing
|
|-
| rowspan=2|1952
| The King and the Mockingbird
| The Shepherdess
| Voice<br /> English version
|-
| Limelight
| Thereza
|
|-
| rowspan=2|1953
| Innocents in Paris
| Susan
|
|-
| The Man Between
| Susanne Mallison
|
|-
| 1955
| Richard III
| Lady Anne
|
|-
| 1956
| Alexander the Great
| Barsine
|
|-
| rowspan=2| 1958
| The Brothers Karamazov
| Katya
|
|-
| The Buccaneer
| Bonnie Brown
|
|-
|1959
| Look Back in Anger
| Helena Charles
|
|-
| 1960
| Brainwashed
| Irene Andreny
|
|-
| rowspan=2| 1962
| The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm
| Dorothea Grimm
|
|-
| The Chapman Report
| Naomi Shields
|
|-
| rowspan=3|1963
| 80,000 Suspects
| Julie Monks
|
|-
| The Haunting
| Theodora
|
|-
| Il maestro di Vigevano
| Ada
|
|-
| rowspan=2| 1964
| Alta infedeltà
| Laura
|
|-
| The Outrage
| Wife
|
|-
| 1965
| The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
| Nan Perry
|
|-
| 1968
| Charly
| Alice Kinnian
|
|-
| rowspan=2|1969
| The Illustrated Man
|Felicia
|
|-
| Three into Two Won't Go
| Frances Howard
|
|-
| rowspan=2| 1971
| A Severed Head
| Honor Klein
|
|-
| Red Sky at Morning
| Ann Arnold
|
|-
| 1973
| A Doll's House
| Nora Helmer
|
|-
| 1977
| Islands in the Stream
|-
|rowspan=2|1956 || Richard II || Queen to King Richard || rowspan=2|Winter Garden Theatre, Broadway ||
|-
|Romeo and Juliet || Juliet ||
|-
|1959 || Rashomon || Wife || Music Box Theatre, Broadway ||
|-
|rowspan=2|1971 || A Doll's House || Nora Helmer || rowspan=2|Playhouse Theater, Broadway ||
|-
|Hedda Gabler || Hedda Tesman ||
|-
|1972 || Vivat! Vivat Regina! || Mary Queen of Scots || Broadhurst Theatre, Broadway ||
|-
|1974 || A Streetcar Named Desire || Blanche DuBois || Piccadilly Theatre ||
|-
|1976 || The Innocents || Miss Bolton || Morosco Theatre, Broadway ||
|-
|1998 || Electra || Clytemnestra || Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway ||
|-
|}
Awards and honours
Bloom was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to drama.
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Year
! Association
! Category
! Nominated work
! Result
! class=unsortable|
|-
|1952 || rowspan=3|BAFTA Award || Most Promising Newcomer || Limelight || ||
|-
|1982 || rowspan=2|Best Actress || Brideshead Revisited || ||
|-
|1986 || Shadowlands || ||
|-
|1982 || Primetime Emmy Award || Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or a Special || Brideshead Revisited || ||
|-
|1967 || New York Emmy Award || Individuals || Sunday Showcase || ||
|-
|1979 || Grammy Award || Best Spoken Word Album || Wuthering Heights || ||
|-
|1971 || Drama Desk Award || Outstanding Performance || Hedda Gabler / A Doll's House || || rowspan=2|
|-
|1999 || Tony Award || Best Featured Actress in a Play || Electra ||
|-
|}
References
External links
- Claire Bloom at Discogs
- while receiving a Lifetime Acting Award at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, 2010, video 9 min.
- Selected performances in University of Bristol Theatre Archive