‘I have kept a sense of wonder’

Tim Walker

27 December 2006

In a rare interview, the actress Claire Bloom talks to Tim Walker about her divorce from Philip Roth, dancing with Billy Zane and her enduring passion for the stage

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.

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