Claire Bloom

Claire Bloom Bio

Patricia Claire Bloom, known professionally as Claire Bloom, is an English actress whose career spans stage, film, and television from the 1940s to the present. Born in Finchley, Middlesex, England, Bloom trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Central School of Speech and Drama, and made her stage debut as a teenager before rising to prominence in London and on Broadway. She has appeared in acclaimed films such as Limelight (1952), The Haunting (1963), Shadowlands (1985), The King’s Speech (2010), and Mighty Aphrodite (1995), as well as major television roles including Brideshead Revisited. Bloom has won multiple awards, including BAFTA and Emmy recognitions, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2013 for services to drama.

Early Life and Background

Claire Bloom was born on 15 February 1931 as Patricia Claire Blume in Finchley, then part of Middlesex, now a suburb of north London. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Grew and Edward Max Blume, a salesman. Her paternal grandparents, originally named Blumenthal, and her maternal grandparents, originally named Gravitzky, were Jewish emigrants from Byten in the Grodno region of Russia, now in Belarus. 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.

After the Luftwaffe began bombing London during the Blitz in 1940, Bloom 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. Bloom was asked by the British War Relief Society to help raise money by entertaining at various benefits, which she did for several weeks. She later recalled that this was how she broke into show business through singing.

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. She wrote later that from then on she thought only of going into the theatre and playing in Chekhov. They returned to England in 1943, and due to her father’s improved business the family lived in Mayfair, but her parents’ marriage ended shortly afterwards when her father married his girlfriend, and she had no contact with him for many years.

Path to Actress

Bloom studied stage acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and continued her studies under Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech and Drama, then based in the Royal Albert Hall. She made her debut on BBC radio programmes and her stage debut in 1946 when she was fifteen with the Oxford Repertory Theatre. Bloom debuted aged sixteen at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre as Ophelia to Paul Scofield’s Hamlet, with Robert Helpmann alternating playing the prince.

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 this 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. After she starred as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, its playwright Tennessee Williams stated that he declared himself absolutely wild about Claire Bloom. Of her Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1957), critic Kenneth Tynan stated it was the best he had ever seen.

Claire Bloom Career

Early Career (1946–1969)

Bloom made her first film role in the 1948 film The Blind Goddess. 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 and she won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer for her performance. Chaplin had no doubt the film would be a success, and in his autobiography he explained that after months of searching and testing with disappointing results, he eventually signed Bloom, who was recommended by his friend Arthur Laurents.

Bloom subsequently appeared in a number of costume roles in films such as Alexander the Great (1956), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), The Buccaneer (1958), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962). She also appeared in Laurence Olivier’s film version of Richard III (1955), in which she played Lady Anne. Other notable films from this period include Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), both with Richard Burton, and The Outrage (1964) with Paul Newman and Laurence Harvey.

Breakthrough (1970–1989)

Bloom appeared in numerous roles on television such as her portrayal of Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (1981). She has also appeared in two prominent BBC Television productions for director Rudolph Cartier, co-starring with Sean Connery in Anna Karenina (1961), and playing Cathy in Wuthering Heights with Keith Michell as Heathcliff (1962). She played Joy Gresham, the wife of C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands, for which she received the BAFTA Award as Best Actress (1985).

In the 1960s she began to play more contemporary roles, including an unhinged housewife in The Chapman Report, a psychologist opposite Cliff Robertson’s Oscar-winning role in Charly, and Theodora in The Haunting. She also played Hera in Clash of the Titans, reuniting her with Olivier who played Zeus. She appeared in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1973) for which she won the Best Actress award at the Taormina International Film Festival. Other theatre roles during this period included Rashomon, Duel of Angels with Vivien Leigh in 1958, and her favourite role, Blanche DuBois, in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire in London in 1974.

Notable Works and Milestones

Bloom appeared in the Woody Allen films Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Mighty Aphrodite (1995). She appeared in the Sylvester Stallone film Daylight (1996) and later appeared as Queen Mary in the 2010 Oscar-winning British film The King’s Speech and as 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 (2019).

She has led workshops on Shakespearean performance practices and appeared in several episodes of ITV’s Doc Martin as Margaret Ellingham, the estranged mother of the title character, Dr. Martin Ellingham. 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.

Claire Bloom Award Nominations

Claire Bloom has received numerous award nominations throughout her distinguished career spanning more than seven decades. Her Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play came for her role in Electra in 1999. She has also received nominations for a Grammy Award, reflecting her work in audio productions. Her career has been recognized across multiple entertainment mediums including film, theatre, and television.

Claire Bloom Awards Won

Claire Bloom has accumulated an impressive collection of awards throughout her career. She won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer for Limelight (1952) and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress for Shadowlands (1985). She has also received Emmy recognition for her television work. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to drama.

Claire Bloom Family

Claire Bloom has one child, Anna Steiger, who is an opera singer. Her father was Edward Max Blume and her mother was Elizabeth Grew. She has a brother named John Bloom. The family background includes Jewish emigrants from Russia, with her paternal grandparents originally named Blumenthal.

Personal Life

Claire Bloom has married three times. Her first marriage in 1959 was to actor Rod Steiger, whom she met when they both performed in the play Rashomon. They had one daughter, Anna Steiger. Steiger and Bloom divorced in 1969. In that same year, Bloom married producer Hillard Elkins. 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. Bloom has written two memoirs about her life and career. The first, Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress, was published in 1982. Her second book, Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir, published in 1996, went into greater detail about her personal life including her marriages and affairs.