‘I have kept a sense of wonder’

30 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

She numbers Gore Vidal as well as many other prominent intellectuals among these friends, but she admits her description of herself in Who’s Who as ‘privately’ educated is a euphemism for uneducated. ‘I had no education to speak of in the formal sense of the word. I was shunted about from school to school during the war — I didn’t stay at any one for more than a year and I left school for good at 14. I obtained my education from my mother, who was an intelligent woman, and reading and then through work and spending time with people who knew more about the world than I did.’

Did she deliberately seek out intelligent men, at least in the early years of her life? ‘Yes, of course. I learnt a lot from such men. They kept me on my toes. It was exciting and I have always looked for excitement in my life, and goodness knows I found it.’

The significant others in her life all happened to be famous. She said once that women, when they are involved with such men, always had to ‘fight for their existence’ and added darkly that all great artists had also, by definition, to be monsters.

‘I think, if I said that, I must have been thinking about a specific experience in my life. I am sure some great artists are very dangerous to women — one thinks of Picasso — but not all of them.’

As a little girl in Finchley, she read Screen Romances and dreamt of being a film star. Her dream became reality when she was just 21 and Chaplin cast her in Limelight. It wasn’t long after that, when she realised the extent to which her private life would be scrutinised by harsh and unforgiving journalists, that she decided it was a dream she could happily discard.

It is doubtful, however, whether any journalist could ever have been as harsh and unforgiving as she was in her own memoirs, Leaving a Doll’s House. With painful honesty, she documented her bitter and expensive divorce from Roth — a man whose behaviour she now describes, with commendable understatement, as ‘less than gentlemanly’ — and admits, too, that to try to save the marriage she had earlier thrown Anna, her teenaged daughter from her union with Rod Steiger, out of their house.