CLAIRE BLOOM Biography - Actors and Actresses

 
 

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CLAIRE BLOOM

Name: Claire Bloom                                                                   
Birth name: Patricia Claire Blume                                                   
Born: 15 February 1931 Finchley, North London, England                               
                                                                                     
Claire Bloom (born Patricia Claire Blume on February 15, 1931) is an English         
film and stage actress.                                                             
                                                                                     
Bloom 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). She attended secondary school at the Badminton School in Bristol.         
                                                                                     
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. 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.                                                   
                                                                                     
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 Theodora 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.                                           
                                                                                     
Bloom has appeared in several films, series and serials for television, perhaps     
the most memorable of which was her portrayal of Lady Marchmain in Brideshead       
Revisited (1981). Other roles included 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 Heathcliffe (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 (1985), and as the older     
Sophy in the 1992 miniseries The Camomile Lawn on Britain's Channel 4. 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.                                   
                                                                                     
In January 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.