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Offstage, Claire Bloom is only a dim approximation of her real (i.e., her stage) self. She dresses like a teenager, in low heels and wide skirts. She listens intently, and with apparent humility, to anyone who offers her advice. At parties, to which she rarely goes, she acts the wallflower.
Unusual Child. She has always known what she wanted. She was reciting Shakespeare at five. Her mother, who has hovered and brooded over her talented daughter since she was a solemn baby, recalls that Claire would have nothing to do with dolls, that in fact she hated dolls. She didn't much like other children either; she much preferred to learn poetry, in order to recite it.
Claire was born in London in 1931. Her father, Edward Blume, is an advertising man who has spent the last five years in South Africa. Her mother comes from a well-to-do manufacturing family (picture frames). When she divorced her husband in 1950, Mrs. Blume had already changed the spelling of her last name.
As a child, Claire often woke up crying. She was afraid of wasps and of crossing a street. A cousin remembers that Claire "had a thing about being shy. She would ask for the butter in almost a whisper." Before Nazi bombs began raining on London in World War II, nine-year-old Claire and her mother were evacuated —first to the southern coast of England, then to the U.S.
They set up housekeeping in a single room in Forest Hills, just a 20-minute subway ride from Manhattan. It was a hand-to-mouth existence. Mrs. Bloom was ill and, because of British monetary regulations, could get little financial help from England. Claire spent her time singing "terribly sad songs," copying out poems from memory (one of her favorites: Poe's ". . . All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream . . ."), or curled up reading her red-leather volume of Shakespeare. She also went to school, but did badly in such practical subjects as arithmetic. In 1943, Claire and her mother returned to London. Says Claire: "We preferred the blitz."
Poetic-Looking People. By war's end Claire had won a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. After school, she took additional lessons in acting from Eileen Thorndike, sister of Dame Sibyl. That veteran teacher said of her: "It is very rarely that you see a born actress, but I think here was a born actress."
At a Kensington dramatic school she won the cup for the best acting of a first-year student (earlier names on the cup: Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft). She was not exactly popular with her classmates. One of them remembers 14-year-old Claire as "sort of fey—she didn't have her feet on the ground at all. You'd be talking to her and suddenly she'd do a pirouette and you knew she hadn't been listening to you at all. Everything had to be rather beautiful, people had to be poetic-looking. She couldn't stand the noise of anything worldly or vulgar." Nevertheless, the classmate felt bound to add: "Most girls look like puddings at that age. Claire never did." On her 15th birthday Claire got her first job: in a BBC radio play, she played the part of a prostitute.