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Poison Speech. Minor roles at the Oxford Playhouse followed. Claire tried out for Webster's The White Devil, which was being put in production by Michael Benthall and Robert Helpmann. Says Benthall: "Suddenly, this little girl appeared and did the poison speech from Romeo and Juliet. She looked enchanting. More important, she had extraordinary technical equipment." The cast was already filled, but Benthall and Helpmann invented a new walk-on part so that they could keep an eye on Claire. When they took over the 1948 Shakespeare season at Stratford-on-Avon, Claire went along.
She was still so young that she had to have the blue ration card issued to children (a source of shame and grief to her), but her Ophelia was excitingly mature. She was given a try for Laurence Olivier's film, Hamlet. She lost the part to Jean Simmons, but Moviemaker J. Arthur Rank was impressed by her, and signed her to a film contract. Her first movie was called The Blind Goddess, a run-of-the-mill picture whose memory still makes Claire wince ("I was a modern ingenue, dancing at the Savoy, that sort of nothing type of thing"). After the picture was made, she asked Rank for a release from her contract, arguing: "I'm not your sort and, frankly, you're no help to me. What's the good of having me against my will?" Rank released her, and Claire played Alizon Eliot in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning, then had a successful 18-month run in a bigger part in the season's hit: Fry's version of Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon.
Charlie Chaplin first heard of Claire from Playwright Arthur Laurents, who had seen her in the London production of Ring Round the Moon. Chaplin asked for some pictures. When he saw them ("Those dark eyes and everything!"), Chaplin brought her to New York for a screen test. The test turned out badly. Claire returned to England in tears and, for four months, heard nothing. Then came the summons from Hollywood. Chaplin had conned and pondered all the possibilities. Said he: "I never think screen tests prove a bloody thing. We finally decided it had to be Claire."
No Cheesecake. Hollywood and Claire never got beyond nodding acquaintance. Although the ballet close-ups from Limelight show that she has an attractive figure and lovely legs, she refused to pose for cheesecake pictures ("I'm not supposed to be Betty Grable"). She gives her measurements as 5 ft. 3, 112 Ibs. Pressed for further details, she cries in a fury: "What has that to do with acting!"
In Hollywood she seldom strayed more than half a block from her mother's raised eyebrows, and was usually home by 11 o'clock. Hedda Hopper says: "My dear, I didn't see her once all the time she was here!" Columnist Sidney Skolsky reports: "She looked like she was going to take off any moment. You know, walking around in a kind of wonderment." Jerry Epstein, Chaplin's assistant, remembers her as the only actress he ever knew who "could name the character and the play if you read her a quote from Shakespeare."