Claire Bloom: ‘Charlie Chaplin drove me to the verge of tears'

Telegraph

24-05-2025

' Charlie Chaplin came to meet me at the airport,' Claire Bloom tells me, as she pours the tea. 'I can still hardly believe it happened. It was like a miracle.'
We're sitting in Bloom's elegant west London townhouse. She is serving Earl Grey from a Doc Martin teapot – between 2005 and 2022, she appeared sporadically in the ITV drama, as the mother of Martin Clunes 's title character ('an absolute joy, she was just so nasty!') – and sharing anecdotes from her illustrious acting career. 'You mean, my illustrious career so far,' she corrects me, with a smile. 'I'm still working, you know.'
At 94, after seven decades in the profession, Bloom still radiates glamour, wit and that indefinable, yet unmistakable, thing: star quality. 'To prepare for this interview, I googled myself,' she confesses. 'And I kept wondering, did I really do all that? How on earth did I find the time?'
One answer: she started young. Shot when she was just 20 years old, Limelight – her 1952 big-screen breakthrough; co-starring, written and directed by Charlie Chaplin – was an early career milestone, winning this Middlesex salesman's daughter a Bafta. But it was far from her first taste of success. Indeed, Bloom's professional debut came in a BBC radio play, the role offered to her while she was still a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her teachers gave her an ultimatum: reject the offer, or leave the school. She took the role – and never looked back.
At 16, she was playing Ophelia to Paul Scofield's Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon. By 1950, she was starring in the West End, again opposite Scofield, in Ring Round the Moon, a charming divertissement by Jean Anouilh, translated by Christopher Fry and directed by Peter Brook. Chaplin's friend Arthur Laurents (who would go on to find fame with Stephen Sondheim, writing the book for West Side Story and Gypsy) saw Bloom dancing in the play, and knew she'd be perfect as the young ballerina Thereza in Limelight.
Chaplin concurred. 'In casting the girl's part I wanted the impossible: beauty, talent, and a great emotional range,' he recalls in his memoirs. 'After months of searching and testing… I eventually had the good fortune to sign up Claire Bloom.'
'I think he'd seen all the young actresses in Hollywood,' says Bloom, whose peaceful sitting room today is dominated by a large impressionistic painting of Chaplin. 'I know he'd been searching for a long time. And he really wanted an English girl, who could dance, not too tall, and dark-haired. In fact, he was looking for someone just like me. But I was a nobody.'
She was invited to Hollywood for a screen test, but her West End producer (the renowned 'Binkie' Beaumont) would only grant the young star one week's leave of absence from her smash-hit play; a meagre amount of time for such an arduous trip. Chaplin, very graciously, offered to meet Bloom halfway: the screen test was moved to New York – and he was indeed waiting for her in the arrivals hall when she landed.
'He simply couldn't have been nicer,' Bloom tells me now, taking a delicate sip of tea. 'My mother was travelling with me as my chaperone and he'd booked us into the Sherry-Netherland.' After the gloom of post-war London, the glitter of one of New York's most opulent hotels was dazzling – but Bloom had little time to enjoy it. 'Every day, we worked together on the scenes and the music-hall routine, which would [feature in] an important dream sequence; I was dancing with Chaplin!' she says. 'Of course, he had very set ideas about how I was to act. He'd written the script, he'd been working on it for months, he was the director and the star. He coached me in every move, every inflection, and I was a willing student.'
After she flew back to London, days went by, then weeks, and not a word from America. Finally, four months after the screen test, the telegram arrived: Bloom was to be Chaplin's new leading lady; her Hollywood adventure had begun.
'Charlie was only mean to me once,' she adds ruefully. 'We were rehearsing a very emotional scene. He suddenly flared up and furiously attacked the way I was playing the role. Of course, I was devastated and on the verge of tears.' Before she could collect herself – and while authentic heartbreak continued to play across her face – 'immediately they bundled me onto the set, and we shot the scene in one take. He'd planned the whole thing!'
Leaving behind the sun-drenched glamour of Los Angeles, Bloom returned home to chilly, grey London, with no work on the horizon and months to wait until the premiere of Limelight. The BBC came to the rescue, with a role in Martine, a French romance to be broadcast live: Bloom's television debut. 'Actually, 'the telly' was considered rather lowbrow in those days,' she notes now. 'Boy, hasn't it changed!' Her co-stars in Martine were Denholm Elliott and Stanley Baker. 'And of all the people in the world, the director was a young Kenneth Tynan.'
I remind her that later in his career, when he had earned a reputation as a formidable theatre critic, Tynan declared Bloom to be the best Juliet he'd ever seen. She deflects the praise with typical modesty. 'Ah yes, but I'm not sure how many Juliets he'd seen…'
Bloom played the young Capulet at the Old Vic in 1952 for the director Hugh Hunt, who had offered her the part after seeing her in Ring Round the Moon. She'd been fascinated by Juliet ever since, as a child, she had seen Norma Shearer in George Cukor's 1936 film opposite Leslie Howard. She threw herself into preparations for the role – consulting commentaries and poring over old reviews to learn how the great actresses of the past had approached it. Then she set aside the books and played the part straight from the heart, as a headstrong Italian teenager. She was a sensation.
Shortly after, the celebrated film producer Alexander Korda put her under exclusive contract – and cast her in The Man Between (1953), a noirish thriller directed by The Third Man's Carol Reed and starring James Mason who, Bloom says, 'was lovely to me'. She continues: 'After the filming, Korda asked me, 'How did you get on with Reed?'. I told him, 'Carol didn't like me. I'm sure of it. But I don't know why'. Korda said, 'Ah, that's because he's a Jew trying to be an Englishman. Like you, my dear, and like me'.'
In fact, Bloom, whose grandparents were Jewish immigrants from the East – Gravitzkys on her mother's side; Blumenthals on her father's – would spend many years strenuously resisting being typecast as an English rose. Indeed, her sense of being 'other' would inform many of her standout performances in the theatre, from Nora in A Doll's House to the title role in Hedda Gabler.
In 1953, she returned to the Old Vic, and to Shakespeare, to play Viola, Helena, Miranda and Ophelia. That last, opposite Richard Burton as Hamlet, marked the start of an enduring professional – and, for six passionate years, personal – partnership that would yield three films of great significance to her career.
First came a Hollywood blockbuster, Alexander The Great (1956). 'That period in history holds the utmost fascination for me,' Bloom tells me. 'The only trouble is, whenever I read about Alexander, I now imagine him looking like Burton. Richard really was very beautiful in the film, except he had to wear such a terrible wig.'
Their next film together was Look Back in Anger (1959) – which gave Bloom, who had 'almost always been in period costume' the 'marvellously liberating' experience of playing a contemporary woman – followed by The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) based on the novel by John le Carré. 'That was a wonderful role. In the original book, my character's name was Liz' – an unfortunate echo of Burton's wife's name – 'but for obvious reasons they changed it, to Nan of all things.'
In her second volume of memoirs, Leaving a Doll's House (1996), Bloom describes Burton as 'my first – my greatest – love, the only man to whom I have fervently and completely given all of myself. To feel so much pleasure from the body, mind, voice, mere presence of another is a gift I am profoundly grateful to have received. Even though it lasted only a few years, I realise now how lucky I was. Many women go through life without ever knowing such happiness.'
Which leads us neatly into a whistle-stop review of Bloom's three American husbands. The first was the actor Rod Steiger, whom she married in 1959, soon after co-starring with him on Broadway. 'He was mostly a kind and good man,' she says now, of the Oscar-winning star, who died in 2002, aged 77. 'And I will always be grateful to him because, together, we had a lovely daughter.' (Now 65, Anna Justine Steiger is an opera singer; she appeared last year at Grange Park in Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment.)
Husband Number Two – to whom Bloom refers now as 'the unmentionable' – was theatre impresario Hillard Elkins; they wed in 1969, shortly after her divorce from Steiger. It was, she explains, a chaotic and disastrous marriage. Nevertheless, Elkins, who died in 2010, deserves credit for producing three of Bloom's most acclaimed stage successes: in 1971, both A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler – for which she won a Drama Desk Award on Broadway – and, three years later, A Streetcar Named Desire. 'For those, I thank him,' she says. 'For the rest, I curse him!'
As Bloom admits, hers was hardly the first face you'd think of when casting Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams's faded southern belle. So when the playwright came to meet her – and, she hoped, give his blessing for a London production – she invited along the novelist Gore Vidal, a mutual friend, for moral support. 'I don't smoke, but I knew it was an important element in Blanche's character. So I was desperately trying to puff away, to impress Tennessee,' she recalls. 'Gore later said, 'Darling, you put the cigarette firmly between your eyes!''
She must have done something right. Williams gave the production the green light, for which Bloom remains grateful: Blanche is, she says, her favourite stage role of all. 'The role asks everything of you. Everything. And if you don't give it, you fail – no half-measures. It's a magnificent play, surely one of the very greatest American plays. But it's utterly demanding and very exhausting to perform. And it takes you to the utmost brink. It certainly doesn't do you any favours mentally! But it's worth it.'
Husband Three was the American novelist, Philip Roth, whom Bloom married, after a long relationship, in 1990 (despite Vidal counselling her against it) and divorced five years later. In Leaving a Doll's House, Bloom describes their tempestuous, volcanic marriage in unsparing detail, although today she concedes that it 'had its wonderful moments, certainly in the first few years. What happened at the end, I'll never be able to comprehend. I've spent too many years wondering and questioning myself. It was as bad as you could get. It was dreadful, and I survived it – but only just.'
But enough of husbands. Her split from Roth was 30 years ago – and, for Bloom at least, life goes on. (Roth died in 2018, aged 85.) By now, she has played virtually every heroine in the Shakespeare canon 'except Cleopatra,' she points out, with a sigh. 'I would have dearly loved to touch that role, to give it a try.'
Yet, both on stage and screen, she has, like Cleopatra herself, displayed 'infinite variety' – not least in classic works by Ibsen, Chekhov, Eugene O'Neill, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Perhaps we should take it in turns to pick our favourites from a lifetime of performances? To begin, one of mine: her stunning portrayal of Anna Karenina in Rudolph Cartier's 1961 production for the BBC opposite a revelatory Vronsky in whose casting, Bloom explains, she had a hand herself.
Earlier that year, she was appearing with Diane Cilento in Jean-Paul Sartre's Altona, at the Royal Court, when her co-star started telling her about a new boyfriend: 'He's a very good actor but he just can't get any work,' Cilento said. 'To make ends meet, he's painting and decorating.'
Shortly after, Bloom says, 'I popped into Diane's dressing room and there he was, this incredibly beautiful man, with wonderfully expressive eyes. I rushed off to tell my dresser – we had dressers in those days – 'You've got to come and see this man!' It was Sean Connery. And when it came to casting Count Vronsky, I mentioned him to the director.'
Connery, who would go on to play James Bond for the first time the following year, got the role; he was, Bloom still contends, 'far and away the finest Vronsky I've ever seen. All that smouldering Scottish passion and power! And it's not an easy role to play: Vronsky is free, and yet completely shackled; he both loves and hates Anna – which is typical of a love affair.'
Next, for one of Bloom's favourite roles: Joy Davidman, in the original 1985 TV film of William Nicholson's Shadowlands. Davidman is a sardonic New Yorker, a Left-wing Jewish intellectual who converts to Christianity and marries C S Lewis (played by Joss Ackland). 'The film was beautifully directed by Norman Stone, but we did have a few friendly tussles about religion,' Bloom tells me. 'In one scene, I said to him, 'Jews don't kneel – except on the Day of Atonement'. Norman gently replied, 'But you see, Joy does kneel, because she is now a Christian'. So – I knelt, already.'
Bloom's performance won her a second Bafta. 'Claire was like an exquisite thoroughbred racehorse, ready to fly,' Stone tells me later, speaking from his home in Glasgow. 'When I told her she was really far too beautiful to play Joy, she replied, 'Then I will wear spectacles'. They lasted for the whole of one scene – then promptly disappeared.'
Time for more Earl Grey – and for me to pick a role: who else, but the icy Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited. Bloom lets me in on a secret: while she was filming the 1981 TV series at Castle Howard
in North Yorkshire, she had a personal advantage; she was already a friend of the castle's then owner, George Howard (aka Baron Howard of Henderskelfe).
'I'd met George at a supper party, this charming English gentleman, very big and jolly, wearing a bright florid tie with yellow butterflies on it,' Bloom explains. 'But I had no more idea of who he was than how to fly to the Moon. A little later, George took me out for lunch and said, 'If you ever feel like getting away for a weekend, why not come and stay with us?''
Some time later, during a period of trauma in her private life, Bloom decided to take him up on the offer. 'But I had no idea where he lived. His lovely son Simon drove me up to Yorkshire, in quite a modest car as I recall. And then we suddenly came upon a quite enormous obelisk, and Simon said, 'Well, here's the beginning of the estate'. So I thought, 'Hello… this is interesting'. Next thing, we arrived at a pyramid. And then – that incredible house.'
Over that weekend, Bloom became firm friends with the Howard family, 'and so later on, when I was cast in Brideshead, and they told me the location, I was able to say 'I know that house'. And George kindly invited me to stay there during the location filming' – which presumably helped her to inhabit the role of Brideshead's imperious chatelaine. As it happened, she adds, her co-star, Jeremy Irons 'was also a friend of the Howards, and so we both lived at the castle. Very superior lodgings for theatricals!'
Philip Roth would visit her occasionally during filming and, she says, relished the idea of a Jewish couple staying in such a grand stately home. 'Try not to feel the curtain fabric and ask how much per yard,' he warned his wife. 'And remember – no Yiddish before breakfast.'
Ironically, Bloom found her Jewish heritage helped her to understand Lady Marchmain's mindset: as a devout Catholic, the Marchioness was something of an outsider in the English aristocracy, so, Bloom says wryly, 'not such a leap from being a Jew in Protestant England as one might imagine'.
However, she adds, somewhat abashed, she very nearly turned down the role. 'Oh, that was only because of E-G-O. I thought I was too young to play the mother of all those grown-up children: Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick and Simon Jones and Phoebe Nicholls. And indeed to play Olivier's wife'. Laurence Olivier, 24 years her senior, played Lord Marchmain. 'But of course, I'm profoundly glad that I did accept.'
It marked the third time that Bloom had played Olivier's spouse. First, she was the beautiful Lady Anne, fated to become Queen Anne, in his 1955 film of Richard III. Watchful viewers won't be surprised to learn that the co-stars carried on a discreet and brief liaison off-screen, too. 'Look at the film,' says Bloom, with a mischievous smile, 'and you'll see the electricity'.
Then in 1981, she appeared in Clash of the Titans as Hera, the wife and also the sister (such are the complications of the Greek gods' sex-lives) of mighty Zeus. 'Olivier played Zeus, of course. Who else?' says Bloom. 'It was great fun being an immortal goddess. I can highly recommend it. What larks, to waft around Mount Olympus with Maggie Smith and Siân Phillips. And Ursula Andress was a joy, and Susan Fleetwood, and Dame Flora Robson. Wonderful cast.'
Many years later, in 2009, Bloom would play an immortal of a different order, as a Time Lord in a two-part Doctor Who Christmas special. 'Oh yes. I was Doctor Who's mother, or so I was told,' she says of a character, identified in the screenplay only as 'The Woman', who remains shrouded in the kind of mystery that drives Whovians loopy – and leaves the rest of us baffled. 'Actually, I never quite understood it, and probably never will, but I was thrilled to be in it.'
It's Bloom's turn to choose a favourite: 'Bonnie Brown,' she says, referring to the pirate she played in The Buccaneer, Anthony Quinn's 1958 film. 'That's a name to conjure with! It involved a great deal of training, which I enjoyed enormously: throwing knives, shooting pistols, doing stunts, and fighting beefy men. All that, plus Yul Brynner as my Captain, which wasn't bad!' Bloom and Brynner were also together in The Brothers Karamazov (1958) – and when I say 'together', you may surmise there was another fleeting off-screen romance.
Looking down her list of screen credits, 125-strong, two films by Woody Allen, catch the eye: Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989, and Mighty Aphrodite six years later. What was he like as a director? 'He was just fine. As long as you're not the one he's picking on, you're all right,' she tells me. 'He was always polite to me, but never friendly.
'But here's the thing that surprised me, and Anjelica Huston who was also in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Two of Woody Allen's cinematic heroes are Charlie Chaplin and John Huston and yet, he never asked us about either of them. I mean, come on – we're probably the closest you'll come to those guys!'
Talking about iconic New Yorkers, I'm curious how she fared performing Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music in 2003. 'We did it at New York City Opera, and I was mildly terrified,' she admits, 'but that's always a good reason to do anything, don't you think? And it was lovely because Jeremy Irons was also in the cast.' She vividly remembers the sitzprobe – the first rehearsal in which the performers get to sing with the full orchestra. She was in the stalls and there was an empty seat beside her. 'And who should come and sit next to me but Stephen flipping Sondheim? So I said, 'This is the worst thing I could imagine'. And he sweetly replied, 'It doesn't come any worse than this!' He was absolutely charming.'
Our time is almost up, the teapot is nearly empty and, yet, we've barely scratched the surface. Among her many other credits, Bloom has starred, with Julie Harris, in one of the most acclaimed horror films of all time (The Haunting, 1963); in a western with Paul Newman (The Outrage, 1964); an Italian comedy with Charles Aznavour (High Infidelity, 1964); a Ray Bradbury fantasy with Steiger (The Illustrated Man, 1969); a Hemingway fable with George C Scott (Islands in the Stream, 1977); a disaster movie with Sylvester Stallone (Daylight, 1996); a British Oscar-winner with Colin Firth (The King's Speech, 2010) and everything in between. And yet, as we scroll through her CV, Bloom astonishes me by seeing only what is missing. 'All the films I turned down,' she sighs. 'I should be put up against a wall and shot!'
In true cinematic style, we end with a flashback – to the start of Bloom's career, or thereabouts – in the form of an anecdote told some decades ago by the playwright Christopher Fry. The year is 1948 and she is auditioning for a new play, The Lady's Not for Burning, which will become one of her early West End successes.
Fry sets the scene: 'John Gielgud, who was directing, asked me and Pamela Brown (the star, already cast) to hear two young actors reading for the roles of Alizon and Richard. Their names were Claire Bloom and Richard Burton. After they had read one or two scenes together – Pamela and I were standing listening on the stage – Pam whispered to me, 'Well, the girl's all right, but I don't think the boy's going to be any good'.' Yes, the girl certainly was all right. Long may she bloom.