Bloom was born on 15 February 1931 as Patricia Claire Blume in Finchley,[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]: 1–2 [4]
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".[7][2][8] 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."[9]: 26 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.[9]: 30 Bloom, along with her mother and brother, next lived in New York with their mother's cousin for another eighteen months before returning to England. It was in New York that she decided to become an actress, after her mother took her to see the Broadway play Three Sisters for her twelfth birthday:
From then on I thought only of going into the theatre and playing in Chekhov. ... Chekhov was moving. That's what I was looking for—something more moving even than my own plight as a little English girl driven from my home by the Gods of War.[9]: 36
They returned to England in 1943, and due to her father's improved business lived in Mayfair, but her parents' marriage ended shortly afterwards – so her father could marry his girlfriend – and she had no contact with him for many years.[7][2]
Bloom made her debut on BBC radio programmes. She made her stage debut in 1946 when she was 15 with the Oxford Repertory Theatre. Bloom debuted aged 16 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre as Ophelia to Paul Scofield's Hamlet; Robert Helpmann alternated playing the prince. Bloom has written that during the production she had a crush on Scofield. As Scofield was married and the father of a son, Bloom hoped only, "to be flirted with and taken some notice of". She later recalled, "I could never make up my mind which of my two Hamlets I found the more devastating: the openly homosexual, charismatic Helpmann, or the charming, shy young man from Sussex."[3]: 43 When asked about Bloom years later, Scofield recalled, "Sixteen years old I think—so very young and necessarily inexperienced, she looked lovely, she acted with a daunting assurance which belied entirely her inexperience of almost timid reticence. She was a very good Ophelia."[10]
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."[11] In his later years, Burton told his biographer, Michael Munn, "'I only ever loved two women before Elizabeth,' Sybil was one, Claire Bloom the other."[11]: 52, 85 Of her Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1957), critic Kenneth Tynan stated it was "the best Juliet I've ever seen". After she starred as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, its playwright, Tennessee Williams, stated, "I declare myself absolutely wild about Claire Bloom".
With Charlie Chaplin in Limelight (1952)
Bloom's first film role was in the 1948 film The Blind Goddess.[12] She trained at the Rank Organisation's charm school[5] 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.[12] Biographer Dan Kamin states that Limelight is a similar story to Chaplin's City Lights, made twenty years earlier, in which Chaplin also helps a heroine overcome a physical handicap. In this film, Bloom plays a suicidal ballerina who "suffers from hysterical paralysis".[13]
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;[citation needed] 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.[14] Bloom states that she felt one of the reasons she got the part was because she closely resembled his young wife, Oona O'Neill.[15][16][12] In his autobiography, Chaplin writes that he had no doubt the film would be a success: "I had fewer qualms about its success than any picture I had ever made."[13] Chaplin explains his decision to make Bloom co-star despite this being her first film:
In casting the girl's part I wanted the impossible: beauty, talent, and a great emotional range. After months of searching and testing with disappointing results, I eventually had the good fortune to sign up Claire Bloom, who was recommended by my friend Arthur Laurents.[17][18]
Claire Bloom as Barsine, with Richard Burton as Alexander, in Alexander the Great (1956)
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;[24] 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."[25] 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."[25] Bloom has also performed in one-woman shows that included monologues from several of her stage performances.[26][27] She also starred in the 1976 Broadway revival of The Innocents.[28] In the 1960s she began to play more contemporary roles, including an unhinged housewife in The Chapman Report,[12] a psychologist opposite Cliff Robertson's Oscar-winning role in Charly,[29] and Theodora in The Haunting.[2] She played Hera in Clash of the Titans, reuniting her with Olivier who played Zeus.
Bloom has appeared in numerous roles on television such as her portrayal of Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (1981).[12] In 1996, she wrote, "I still find it puzzling when I am told I played a manipulative and heartless woman; that is not how I saw her. Lady Marchmain is deeply religious, and her dilemma includes trying to raise a wilful brood of children on her own, while instilling them with her rigid observance of the Catholic code. Sebastian is both an alcoholic and a homosexual, and from her point of view, he lives in a state of mortal sin. She has to fight for his soul by any means in her power, with the knowledge that her efforts may lead to his destruction. A born crusader, the Marchioness confronts her difficult choices head on; her rigidity of purpose, which I don't in any way share, is understandable in context. The aspect that rings most true is her sense of being an outsider, a Catholic in Protestant England. Not such a leap from being a Jew in Protestant England as one would imagine."[3]: 162
Bloom has married three times.[2] Her first marriage, in 1959, was to actor Rod Steiger, whom she met when they both performed in the play Rashomon.[45] Their daughter is opera singer Anna Steiger.[45][28] Steiger and Bloom divorced in 1969.[28] In that same year, Bloom married producer Hillard Elkins.[46] The marriage lasted for three years, and the couple divorced in 1972.[citation needed] Bloom's third marriage on 29 April 1990, was to writer Philip Roth, her longtime companion.[47] They divorced in 1995.[5]
Memoir
Bloom has written two memoirs about her life and career. The first, Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress, was published in 1982 and was an in-depth look at her career and the film and stage roles she had portrayed.[28] Her second book, Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir, published in 1996, went into greater details about her personal life; she discussed not only her marriages but also her affairs with Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and Yul Brynner.[48] The book created a stir when Bloom described her former marriage to Roth. Soon after, Roth wrote a "revenge novel" I Married a Communist (1998), in which the character of Eve Frame appeared to represent Bloom.[49][50]
