One night early in the run of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Claire Bloom tripped on the stage of the Haymarket theatre in the West End and fell flat on her face. ‘I managed to get up and the audience was kind enough to applaud,’ she says in that impeccable Received Pronunciation that is her trademark. ‘I bowed and then I just got on with it.’
The story is a perfect metaphor for the actress’s eventful life. Even after her worst falls — one thinks of the end of her youthful, passionate relationship with a married Richard Burton (‘my greatest love’), and the more recent, acrimonious divorce from the novelist Philip Roth — she has always managed not merely to get up again but to do so with aplomb.
Miss Bloom, who celebrates her 76th birthday in February, has an intelligent, sensitive and still very beautiful face with dark, vulnerable eyes. As she talks to me in the Haymarket’s star dressing-room, I am struck by how little she has changed since she played Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited almost a quarter of a century ago.
‘I am contracted to this play until March, so this room will pretty much be my home until then. A long run means a rather solitary life. One can’t see one’s friends, except perhaps if they come backstage after the show. One has to ration one’s energy, certainly in this play when I am on stage the whole time with Billy Zane, in turn exchanging dialogue with him and dancing with him. It’d take a lot out of anyone.’
Throughout her life, even when she has been under the periods of greatest stress, she has always been the consummate professional, never once missing a performance. Acting has, I suggest, turned out to be the most enduring love affair of her life and she does not demur. ‘I seem somehow to have kept alive in me that sense of wonder that we all have when we are children and we pretend to be someone we are not.’
Miss Bloom seldom grants interviews these days and certainly abhors the cult of celebrity. ‘Even the word makes me sick. Some actors and actresses do seem to seek this dubious status, but it is what we do on stage or on film that matters. What this or that actor thinks about politics is really neither here nor there. I mean, who cares? I most sincerely hope no one takes any notice when members of my profession start talking about such matters.’
For all that, Miss Bloom is defined in the public consciousness not merely by her parts — Lady Marchmain, Terry in Chaplin’s Limelight, and, on stage, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Nora in A Doll’s House — but also the men in her life: Burton, Olivier, Anthony Quinn, Yul Brynner and her three husbands — Rod Steiger, the producer Hillard Elkins and, latterly, Roth.
One of the more memorable lines in her current play is, ‘Everyone pays for sex, one way or another.’ Miss Bloom thinks that’s very true. ‘It’s never straightforward and simple. We always pay an emotional price.’ One wonders if Miss Bloom feels the price has been too high. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘It has been fair. I am still here.’
That there is no man in her life at the moment does not apparently bother her. ‘Of course I would not have asked to be single at this stage in my life, but it is what I have got. I don’t think there will be another man now. I don’t think that I could start again from scratch. I have a lot of friends — and of course I have my daughter — so I don’t feel lonely.’
She numbers Gore Vidal as well as many other prominent intellectuals among these friends, but she admits her description of herself in Who’s Who as ‘privately’ educated is a euphemism for uneducated. ‘I had no education to speak of in the formal sense of the word. I was shunted about from school to school during the war — I didn’t stay at any one for more than a year and I left school for good at 14. I obtained my education from my mother, who was an intelligent woman, and reading and then through work and spending time with people who knew more about the world than I did.’
Did she deliberately seek out intelligent men, at least in the early years of her life? ‘Yes, of course. I learnt a lot from such men. They kept me on my toes. It was exciting and I have always looked for excitement in my life, and goodness knows I found it.’
The significant others in her life all happened to be famous. She said once that women, when they are involved with such men, always had to ‘fight for their existence’ and added darkly that all great artists had also, by definition, to be monsters.
‘I think, if I said that, I must have been thinking about a specific experience in my life. I am sure some great artists are very dangerous to women — one thinks of Picasso — but not all of them.’
As a little girl in Finchley, she read Screen Romances and dreamt of being a film star. Her dream became reality when she was just 21 and Chaplin cast her in Limelight. It wasn’t long after that, when she realised the extent to which her private life would be scrutinised by harsh and unforgiving journalists, that she decided it was a dream she could happily discard.
It is doubtful, however, whether any journalist could ever have been as harsh and unforgiving as she was in her own memoirs, Leaving a Doll’s House. With painful honesty, she documented her bitter and expensive divorce from Roth — a man whose behaviour she now describes, with commendable understatement, as ‘less than gentlemanly’ — and admits, too, that to try to save the marriage she had earlier thrown Anna, her teenaged daughter from her union with Rod Steiger, out of their house.
‘Philip had given me an ultimatum, but I shouldn’t have written that. I was ill-advised. There are some things it is better to keep private. My daughter Anna and I have, however, come through all of that. She has now distinguished herself in the world of opera and I regard her as my best friend.’
She accepts that she had some good times with Roth before it all went wrong, but says that she has no desire ever to see or hear from him again. He cost her a great deal, not least in therapists’ bills.
‘I saw someone who dealt specifically with women’s problems, particularly battered women. I had been psychologically battered. It took ten years for me to come to terms with what had happened but now I can evolve the experience into something that is positive.’
When she is not acting herself, Miss Bloom is an enthusiastic follower of serious theatre in London — I saw her in the audience at the Arcola in Dalston, north London, not so long ago — but her present play could scarcely be described in such terms. She has acted with both Olivier and Gielgud and I wonder whether she doesn’t feel a sense of anticlimax in her career.
‘To have had Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson all come to the fore in the same generation was a phenomenon. We will never see that again. There are, however, some immensely talented people now — Ralph Fiennes is a superb actor. There is Juliet Stevenson, Harriet Walter — I could go on.’
As for the play, it is fun to do and it pays the bills and, in its own terms, she feels it works very well. ‘And, you know, I wish you’d given me more of a chance to talk about it,’ she says. ‘Talking about the past doesn’t really interest me.’
I wonder if Miss Bloom is a contented person. She smiles sweetly. ‘It’s taken a while, but I think I have finally become one.’
< span style="font-style: italic;">Tim Walker is the theatre critic and diary editor of the Sunday Telegraph.