Claire Bloom

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Bloom with Guy Pearce , 2011

Claire Bloom , CBE (* 15. February 1931 as Patricia Claire Blume in London ) is a British actress . She became internationally known for the first time through Limelight (1952) alongside Charlie Chaplin . So far she has acted in around 120 film and television productions, and she has also enjoyed great success at the theater.

Life

theatre

Claire Bloom was born in London to the businessman Edward Max Blume and the writer Elizabeth Grew. When her mother married the sculptor Edward Bloom, she not only took his family name, but also became the half-sister of the later Oscar-winning cutter John Bloom . At the age of 12 she attended drama school. From 1946 she played at the Oxford Repertory Theater, then at the Shakespeare Memorial Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon . So she made a name for herself as a theater actress at a young age. So the legendary critic Kenneth Tynan called her the "best Julia I have ever seen".

Even after her film successes, Bloom remained connected to the theater stage, and she described Blanche DuBois in Endstation Sehnsucht as her favorite role . She had other demanding leading roles in Henrik Ibsen's Nora or A Doll's House and Eugene O'Neill's One Long Day's Journey into the Night . In addition to appearances in London, she also performed several times on New York's Broadway between the 1950s and 1990s .

Movie and TV

She played her first film role in 1948 in The Blind Goddess . She had her breakthrough as a film actress in 1952 with the Chaplin film Limelight , in which she was seen in the leading female role as the young dancer Terry. Chaplin found Bloom while looking for an actress with "beauty, talent and emotional reach." She won the British Academy Film Award for her performance.

Numerous other leading roles in British and international cinema followed, she appeared in particular in period films and in literary adaptations. In the 1950s, she starred opposite James Mason in Carol Reed's Dangerous Vacation (1953), as Lady Anne in the star-studded Shakespearean film Richard III. (1955) with Laurence Olivier in the title role and as Katja in the Dostoyevsky film adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov (1958) by Richard Brooks . In 1960 she played the leading female role in the German literary film adaptation of Schachnovelle with Mario Adorf . In the 1960s she celebrated further film successes, for example with the hinted lesbian character Theodora in the horror film Until the Blood Freezes , directed by Robert Wise and as a soulful psychiatrist for Cliff Robertson in Charly, who was Oscar-winning for his role . She played one of her best-known cinema roles in 1965 as the idealistic communist Nan Perry in Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came from the Cold, based on the novel by John le Carré .

Bloom has also appeared in many television films and series since the 1950s, in both the UK and the US. For her portrayal of "Lady Marchmain" in the television miniseries Wiedersehen mit Brideshead (1981) she received nominations for an Emmy Award and a BAFTA Award. Also in 1981 she played the Greek goddess Hera in the fantasy film Clash of the Titans . Directed by Woody Allen , she appeared in his films Crime and Other Trifles (1989) and Aphrodite's Mistress (1995). In the series Doctor Who she played the role of a mysterious time traveler in two episodes in 2009 and 2010. In 2010 she played Maria von Teck in the Oscar-winning drama The King's Speech with Colin Firth . In 2019 she starred in the BBC miniseries Summer of Rockets .

Private

Claire Bloom was married three times. Her marriage to Rod Steiger in 1959 was divorced after ten years; Their daughter Anna Justine Steiger , a well-known mezzo-soprano, emerged from her. After another failed marriage with the theater producer Hillard Elkins, she lived with the writer Philip Roth from 1975 , whom she married in 1990. In 1995 this marriage was divorced.

Bloom wrote in her memoir about Philip Roth that he was "a psychopath, drug addict, full of hatred for women, paranoid, a sadist and pathologically stingy". She once asked him to read a script for a film she was to appear in and he charged her $ 150 an hour for it and issued a proper bill for it. When she finally couldn't stand it any longer and filed for divorce, he demanded a lawyer for compensation of 62 billion dollars; a billion for each of her years of life, and he was also vengeful. In his first novel after the divorce, My Man the Communist , he featured an extremely unlikable character named Eve, in whom Claire Bloom was easily recognizable.

She wrote two autobiographies with Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress and Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir . Because of her services to the British theater, Bloom was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2013.

Filmography (selection)

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Claire Bloom  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Queen Elizabeth II. Birthday Honors List 2013. (pdf; 652 kB) In: gov.uk. June 3, 2013, p. 9 , accessed February 15, 2021 (English).
  2. ↑ Claire Bloom Biography (1931–). In: Film Reference. Retrieved February 15, 2021 .
  3. ↑ a b c Stuart Jeffries: Screen gods, guilt and glamor: actor Claire Bloom on her life in the limelight. In: The Guardian . December 23, 2016, accessed on July 2, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Hal Erickson: Claire Bloom: Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos. In: AllMovie . Retrieved July 2, 2020 .
  5. ^ Claire Bloom - Broadway Cast & Staff. In: Internet Broadway Database . Retrieved July 2, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Dinitia Smith: Claire Bloom Looks Back in Anger at Philip Roth. In: NYtimes.com . September 17, 1996, accessed February 15, 2021 .
  7. ^ The Montgomery Fellows Program: Claire Bloom. In: montgomery.dartmouth.edu . February 22, 2017, accessed July 2, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Bloom, Claire
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blume, Patricia Claire (real name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION British actress
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH London