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Claire Bloom
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 a Drama Desk Award as well as nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award, 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.
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, and continued her studies under Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech and Drama, then based in the Royal Albert Hall, 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. 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.
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Claire Bloom
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 a Drama Desk Award as well as nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award, 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.
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, and continued her studies under Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech and Drama, then based in the Royal Albert Hall, 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. 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.