the following program is made possible in part by a generous grant from the educational foundation of america city university television welcome to spotlight i may add also that my guest is one of the foremost actresses in the english speaking world miss claire bloom claire welcome claire you have such an illustrious career but i really want to start at the old vic in romeo and juliet playing juliet and on october the sixteenth barely a month later the film of lamb light opened in london in which you costarred with charlie chaplin and in november you on the cover of time magazine and you became an international star now as we know anybody who's in the theater none of this happens overnight and i want to go back and trace a little bit how you got to that point at such a very young age when did you first hear about  exposed to romeo and juliet well just to answer your face it happened as near overnight as is a possible to be interred if you're not you know i don't know in terms of your fame but not in terms of your work in the in the theater  and when my mother read it to me she used to read me shakespeare which i loved and when i went to see the film of really enjoyed it with norma cher and lesley howard how old were you at that point i contra around we lived in bristol we lived in cardiff we lived in hampshire so you went to a number of different schools then oh yes i don't really didn't really remember anything about any of them well at what point were you smitten with the theatre then along the way well that was constant i mean yeah from the from as far back as you can remember as far back as i can remember which is going to see a play chords and george and know where the rainbow ends which the italia school of acting used to put on every christmas it was about some george and the dragon i would think i was about six and that was it my aunt was also quite a famous actress she was a i think you consider her an important influence enormously yes you're little bit about her now she was my mother's sister a little couple of years older than my mother and a very intense very intelligent woman who probably though she was a good actress should have done something in a way that was more academically connected with the theatre or she was a linguist she was she was altogether very remarkable judy a student of the theatre my mother entered her in some beauty not beauty contest bathing suit but beautiful face you know send a photograph in which she won and as a play the name of which i don't know where she played a woman who was executed and part of this was tremendous strain on her and she became very ill really so really from the end of the thirty's or mid forty's on then you so you began acting the end rather would began training up again it was this where you were you doing things at home were you doing things screw what was i doing this or i was giving recitations where you just have to open the door and there i was doing the fighting but at school the school play was my only pleasure i loathed school and i wasn't very good academically but my great pleasure was playing the princess and rumpelstiltskin or whatever i was given to do well now as far as juliet since we're tracing a little yeah a shakespearean career at this into reading up to that juliet that you at the old vic didn't you have a some sort of try out when you were only fourteen years old for this is this is and is not true  it's gone into the realms of legend well no what is the true story true story is that my aunt did in fact discover peter brook who was a very young director and asked him to direct her on a tour in the war one of them as my audition yes yes i'd always want to do or one of your early theater experiences again when you were very young i was going to stratford didn't you have a season that stratford ranks or feeder and several other part yes when i was seventeen seventeen by this belligerence behind me i went to the oxford repertory company when i was fifteen were you the youngest person involved in that yes by far yeah i guess and then probably for several years you were the youngest person in the company always i was always the youngest person in the company i still had i have been a child's ration book i think i probably did when i went to stratford i know i was a nobody else could now did your mother go with you always as your chaperone from you know really no she didn't you know i mean here you are what did the company look after stratford was the most protected environment you could be and that's why i loved it so i think vocal training or have you just had a natural voice i mean you know speaking shakespeare is not that easy and to project on the stratford stage when you were sixteen or seventeen years old and playing with these figures like yeah scofield was a man of  must have been able to do it i had very little training i had and when i left school so to speak at fourteen i had no must have been between thirteen and fourteen i had an extremely at something called the arts educational school where you did dancing and what was then called musical comedy and tap and wonderful things in the morning and then you had lessons in the afternoon which nobody took much notice of and then you had the acting classes which is what i waited for my aunt didn't think that was serious enough for me which is a pity because i was extremely happy there and there was a scholarship to be had at the guildhall school of music where my daughter in fact has also studied now and i won it and i was fourteen and i think i had to say that i was fifteen i lied naturally and i stayed there a year but not solidly and i had classes or less did you must have had when i was young and it took me a long time to try to eradicate that let me ask you about this phase of your career that is when you were sixteen seventeen eighteen and so forth and you were getting these roles you were working in oxford and then it stratford and at the end of that i was seen by an agent who come to see somebody else and took me on and then offered me a broadcast and the principal of the central said stay here or do the broadcast so i said well shows the  goodbye yes well i'm sure this was probably what i say i'm sure i want to ask you because it was i'm sure partly your ambition and your love of wanting to perform and but also to make money i presume because you were supporting your family from the time you were very young if i'm not well yes i had to make money to you and i had to make it on my own terms my mother always who was really i mean i talk about mary my aunt but my mother was really the great influence and she wouldn't have to let me do anything she didn't think first rate and she always said rather you know do something small with first rate people then a big part with that doesn't mean a hearing and though i needed the money we needed the money live i don't know well one thing i'm fascinated about in knowing of those years and you know and knowing you and knowing the sort of image you project because you project an image of being tremendously ladylike and tremendous our dream is no we're here you were being in it started at such a young age really supporting your mother and your brother and the members of your family with tremendous responsibility you know there's got to be a toughness there that goes in staying in the theater at times when it perhaps was not things were always working out in this kind of thing to it must have done there were times i didn't think i was tough enough for the theatre i think it's a very very very difficult life  but i've always come back bounced up i want to go but i want to continue on this track we were on in terms of getting to that point of that debut in romeo and juliet when you were then by then i guess twenty or twenty one royal shakespeare company in the sense that it was not in london there was the old vic and the stratford company which was in stratford did not come to mind or did come but for short sale seasons so it was in effect on national and when i was in during the war when i was in my very very early i didn't heed in my teens my arithmetic is not the best but i was eleven or twelve i suppose i my mother and my poor brother and i would go every saturday simmons who was supposed to play it was not allowed to by rank to them she was under contract helping recommended to me i went and i made it test with  was pretty thrilling as you can imagine all of sixteen i thought i had it and i think i probably did but two days later gene simmons was released from her contract so this was i thought life was over america yeah and no i sort of saw it in london but it was after i think you had left it because went into another production which i did see and saw you in which was a ring around the moon which it was a christopher fry adaptation brotherhood was in it and it was very beautiful how all this time you were getting incredible experience yes because you yourself were acting in all of these places we've talked about but we should back up a little bit and say that in the lady's not for burning go good was was in there but also who were you playing opposite oh well they're young welsh act richard now what was that like to be here to be playing in that production with your good and then burton who at that a presence or what would you say recognizably an incredible presence and very talented very beautiful he had these incredible kind of flaps that green eyes that i've never seen on anybody in my life him one i thought so striking i sent for it and asked if i could have it and it was a tape with recording i didn't even know he'd made of his first part of his first hamlet and gardens and extremely contemporary and and had never been down one so but but his indeed his father his brother the brothers they were miners from a very small very poverty stricken village and he and that was a fork so certainly not working well spoken middle class well behaved and there's this this force the in terms of again of the juliet we've been speaking about you i think you the made a distinction in your book limelight and after i'd least i assume between playing or fear which of course is one of the famous shakespearean female roles and juliet because juliet i think you feel is so much more demanding well it's carries the play i mean ophelia is a wonderful part but if you wrote a lines down you probably would be very little among that she actually has to do which makes it very difficult to do because you have to establish it whenever you come on  this the great sweep from child to the woman with the great arias and the great scenes and the great emotions figure doesn't have these so what do you think that you were able to play ophelia successfully what you did when you were younger because there are these sort of individual scenes which you were able to convey what i was called for in those moments but then in juliet you really had to develop as you suggest this curve the sweep that carries her through from being a child to a very young to a woman i would argue that in two parts first of all i am always better when i carry the big responsibility of the play than when i have a smaller things to do it always happened but secondly i don't know how well ophelia's course i only know that i was seventeen and so very young and vulnerable that everything made sense because she's a very difficult character and one of the really the only ways that you can play it is to  and i went over in my mind as i was walking her scenes and of course my understanding of the her mental disintegration now is completely different to the way it would have been when i was often age right to play it yes but for juliet you did i mean not that you hadn't before but you did a tremendous amount i think of homework probably for that oh i always used to do much and travelled and went to italy and drank all the books changing i should say in the part and she went through it i yes i don't know that that was so much the responsibility because i didn't really understand that kind of responsibility then i just thought it was some wonderful story that you told but the responsibility  very young as most wonderful actor romeo yes you will not believe this but our thirty minutes is up i would say i've spoken about that so much and i'm going to ask you about it on another program  and but i thank you so much for sharing all because it's wonderful to learn all these stories about how you got started and what you had to do to get to that point we talked about thank you so much this has been spotlight and my guest has been claire blo thank you for being with us the preceding program was made possible in part by a generous grant from the educational foundation of america