Claire Bloom

Claire Bloom (born  Patricia Claire Blume; 15 February 1931) is an English film and  stage actress. ==Early life [edit] ==

Bloom was born in the North London suburb of Finchley, the daughter of Elizabeth (née Grew) and Edward Max Blume, who worked in sales.Her paternal grandparents, originally named Blumenthal, as well as her maternal grandparents, originally named Gravitzky, were Jewish immigrants from Byten, in the Grodno region of Russia, now in Belarus, Eastern Europe. Bloom attended secondary school at the independent Badminton School in Bristol, Gloucestershire. She is the sister of film editor John Bloom. ==Personal life [edit] ==

Bloom has married three times. Her first marriage, in 1959, was to actor Rod Steiger, whom she had met when they both performed in the play Rashomon. Their daughter is opera singer Anna Steiger, Bloom's only child. Steiger and Bloom divorced in 1969. In that same year, Bloom married producer Hillard Elkins. The marriage lasted three years and the couple divorced in 1972. Bloom's third marriage on 29 April 1990, was to writer Philip Roth, her longtime companion. The couple divorced in 1995.

Bloom has written two memoirs about her life and career. The first, Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress, was released in 1982 and was an in-depth look at her career and the film and stage roles she had portrayed. Her second book, Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir, was published in 1996 and went into greater details about her personal life; she discussed not only her marriages but her romantic relationships with Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier. The book created a stir when Bloom detailed the highly complicated relationship between her and Philip Roth during their marriage. The details Bloom shared were unflattering to Roth and created a controversy regarding the true nature of their relationship. The character of Eve Frame in Roth's novel I Married a Communist (1998) is considered to be his veiled rebuttal to some of the accusations made against him in her memoir.