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Charlie Bloom Biography & Facts

Patricia Claire Bloom (born 15 February 1931) is an English actress. She is known for leading roles on stage and screen and has received two BAFTA Awards and a Drama Desk Award as well as nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award, a Grammy Award and a Tony Award. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to drama. After a childhood spent in England, Bloom studied drama in London. She debuted on the London stage when she was sixteen and took roles in various Shakespeare plays. They included Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia alongside Richard Burton. She rose to prominence playing leading roles in stage productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, A Doll's House, and Long Day's Journey into Night. She made her Broadway debut in the play Richard II (1956). She received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play nomination for her role in Electra (1999). Bloom made her film debut in The Blind Goddess (1948). Her breakthrough came with a leading role acting opposite Charlie Chaplin in Limelight (1952) where she was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She went on to act in films such as Richard III (1955), Alexander the Great (1956), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), The Haunting (1963), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965), Charly (1968), A Doll's House (1973), Clash of the Titans (1981), and Shadowlands (1985). She later acted in the Woody Allen films Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and portrayed Queen Mary in historical drama The King's Speech (2010). During her film career, she has starred alongside numerous major actors, including Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson, Yul Brynner, George C. Scott, James Mason, Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Rod Steiger and Jerry Lewis. Early life and education Bloom was born on 15 February 1931 as Patricia Claire Blume in Finchley, then part of Middlesex (now a suburb of North London), the daughter of Elizabeth (née Grew) and Edward Max Blume, a "not very successful" salesman. Her paternal grandparents, originally named Blumenthal, as well as her maternal grandparents, originally named Gravitzky, were Jewish emigrants from Byten in the Grodno region of Russia, now in Belarus, Eastern Europe.: 1–2  She is Russian British and practises Judaism. Bloom's education was "somewhat haphazard"; she was sent to the independent Badminton School in Bristol, but when her father encountered financial difficulties the family relocated to Cornwall, where she attended the local village school. She later studied stage acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and continued her studies under Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech and Drama, then based in the Royal Albert Hall, London. After the Luftwaffe began bombing London during the Blitz in 1940, her family had a number of narrow escapes as bombs dropped close to their home. While their father remained in England, she and her brother John went with their mother to the United States, where she spent a year living in Florida with a paternal uncle's family; during this time her mother worked for her aunt's dress shop, "but she proved to be a dreadful saleswoman". She recalls, "It was 1941; I was ten, John was nearly six. We were to sail from Glasgow in a convoy, on a ship that was evacuating children.": 26  During her year stay in Florida, she was asked by the British War Relief Society to help raise money by entertaining at various benefits, which she then did for a number of weeks. "Thus I broke into show business singing", she writes.: 30  Bloom, along with her mother and brother, next lived in New York with their mother's cousin for another eighteen months before returning to England. It was in New York that she decided to become an actress, after her mother took her to see the Broadway play Three Sisters for her twelfth birthday: From then on I thought only of going into the theatre and playing in Chekhov. ... Chekhov was moving. That's what I was looking for—something more moving even than my own plight as a little English girl driven from my home by the Gods of War.: 36  They returned to England in 1943, and due to her father's improved business lived in Mayfair, but her parents' marriage ended shortly afterward – so her father could marry his girlfriend – and she had no contact with him for many years. Acting career 1946–1969: Early roles and breakthrough Bloom made her debut on BBC radio programmes. She made her stage debut in 1946 when she was 15 with the Oxford Repertory Theatre. Bloom debuted aged 16 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre as Ophelia to Paul Scofield's Hamlet; Robert Helpmann alternated playing the prince. Bloom has written that during the production she had a crush on Scofield. As Scofield was married and the father of a son, Bloom hoped only, "to be flirted with and taken some notice of". She later recalled, "I could never make up my mind which of my two Hamlets I found the more devastating: the openly homosexual, charismatic Helpmann, or the charming, shy young man from Sussex.": 43  When asked about Bloom years later, Scofield recalled, "Sixteen years old I think—so very young and necessarily inexperienced, she looked lovely, she acted with a daunting assurance which belied entirely her inexperience of almost timid reticence. She was a very good Ophelia." Her London stage debut was in 1947 in the Christopher Fry play The Lady's Not For Burning, which starred Sir John Gielgud and Pamela Brown and featured a young Richard Burton. It also played on Broadway in New York City. It was during the rehearsals for the play that Burton and Bloom began a long love affair. The following year, she received acclaim for her portrayal of Ophelia in Hamlet starring Burton. Although Burton was at that time married to Sybil Christopher, fellow actor and friend of Burton, Stanley Baker, seeing how attracted he was to Bloom, commented that he "thought that this might be the time when Rich actually left Sybil." In his later years, Burton told his biographer, Michael Munn, "'I only ever loved two women before Elizabeth,' Sybil was one, Claire Bloom the other.": 52, 85  For her Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1957), critic Kenneth Tynan stated it was "the best Juliet I've ever seen". After she starred as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, its playwright, Tennessee Williams, stated, "I declare myself absolutely wild about Claire Bloom". Bloom's first film role was in the 1948 film The Blind Goddess. She trained at the Rank Organisation's charm school but did not stay with that company for long. Her international screen debut came in the 1952 film Limelight, when she was chosen by Charlie Chaplin, who also directed, to co-star alongside him. The film catapulted Bloom to stardom. Biographer Dan Kamin states that Limelight is a similar story to Chaplin's City Lights, made twenty years e.... Discover the Charlie Bloom popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Charlie Bloom books.