Claire Bloom (Globe Staff Photo / Mark Wilson) |
The Interview
Claire Bloom
By John Koch, Boston Globe
Actress Claire Bloom, 66, has reinvented herself as a creator of one-woman shows, including Enter the Actress, coming to the American Repertory Theatre in January.
Has donating your papers to Boston University heightened your sense of mortality?
We are mortal - that's why I gave them. I didn't have an immense amount of memorabilia from my theater time. What I did have were a great many letters, some very personal and very remarkable, from my ex-husband [novelist Philip Roth], and I don't want anyone to see them until we're both gone. I found I had much more than I thought: letters from Oona Chaplin and Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. There are things I don't want lost.
Are actors born?
It's fact - I don't know what else to say. Born with different talents, of course. They have to have a sexual allure, I think, although one can certainly think of some [laughing] who don't. They have to have great passion. They have to have a great love of literature because, basically, you are a conduit for great writers. It doesn't mean you don't have to have training, but without the gift, whatever that may be, it's not going to happen. A film star is something else.
You believe you didn't have those ingredients.
I loved being in movies, but whatever it is that makes a major movie star, I didn't have; I don't know what it is. I would have loved to have made some of those romantic comedies that Audrey Hepburn made, but she was that much more beautiful.
Do you regret not having a grander screen career?
No. I did a lot of good movies. I wouldn't have liked the personal life and all the interviews - if you don't mind my saying. [Laughter.] I'm very private. At one point, I really did want it, not for long.
What's it like, being able to see yourself at so many stages of life on film?
I think, who is it? Is it me? Do I like what she's doing? It's peculiar. You see this other creature - it is you and yet no longer you at all. I think the audience resents your getting older because they always want you to be as you were. That's very strange - it doesn't happen to anybody other than actors.
Do you like seeing Claire Bloom on screen?
I find it very painful. I've seen Limelight [the 1952 Charlie Chaplin film costarring Bloom at age 21] several times, and I still think it's a wonderful movie, and though there are things that I do that are clumsy, I'm lovely in it, or ``she'' was lovely in it.
Did Tennessee Williams see your Blanche DuBois?
Yes. He said it was the best Blanche he ever saw - but, you know, he said that about every one he saw.
Did you believe him?
Of course. I was bloody good, too. I've been so damned lucky. That and Mary Tyrone [in Long Day's Journey Into Night] are the two great roles for women in the 20th century, after Ibsen, and I played them both. [A Streetcar Named Desire] is a perfect play.
You did soap opera, then a disaster film with Stallone - for the money?
Sure. As the World Turns. I never dreamt of doing one, but after my divorce [from Roth], I became terrified, as many women do, about money. I did it for a while, and then they asked me to join for a year. OK, I don't want to do it again, but they were kind, it was good money, and also I was writing my book [Leaving a Doll's House, a memoir about Bloom's career and often agonizing relationship with Roth]. I took my electric typewriter to the studio. The same applies to the Stallone film [Daylight]: I was paid well and I was in Rome for four months in a lovely apartment. I would do it tomorrow.
You had to fall back on your resources alone.
It was a shock. It was a survival issue. I thought that I was finished and couldn't continue at all. I'm amazed, if I may say so, at myself. I guess I'm tough. And I have found a new life. I haven't found a new emotional life, I'm quite alone, but I've found a freedom.
Given the hardships of your last marriage, perhaps being alone isn't a bad thing.
[Rod] Steiger was a very good man, a wonderful father [to daughter Anna]; we just really were not suited. The second marriage [to producer Hillard Elkins] was a disaster, and I don't speak of it. I wouldn't have missed one minute of my years with Philip - they were the happiest of my life. So I can't say that was a mistake. It ended more dreadfully than one could imagine, but I wouldn't have missed it. And it was really largely due to him that I have the courage to do some of the things that I do. He changed my life. That he nearly destroyed it is perhaps the other side of what happened.
You once said, ``I do not know if I have had much fun.''
[Robust laughter.] I was geared to work and to achieve high things somehow - that's what my mother wanted, and that's what I've done. And I suppose that's been my fun. I haven't, I'm sure, had fun in the sense that young people should have it. I did miss all those adolescent years, no question, but I've had great pleasure. I have to work; it's been central to my life always. The experiences I've wanted, I think in many ways I've had. I'm not a great social animal, anyway.
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