Cinema: She Knew What She Wanted

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The producer had said—and the newspaper quoted him: "Romeo and Juliet is not a play for aging prima donnas. Juliet should be played by a girl of 14." Producer Peter Brook was only half-serious about wanting a child-Juliet; he was mostly trying to attract attention to his forthcoming season at Stratford-on-Avon's Memorial Theater. But next morning his phone rang and a breathless voice said: "My name is Claire Bloom. It said in the papers that you wanted a girl of 14 to play Juliet. I am 14!"

Producer Brook asked her to come and see him. He gravely explained to the child —who, nevertheless, looked considerably older than her 14 years—that what he was really after was an experienced actress who might possibly pass for the age of Shakespeare's Juliet.* He now admits: "Little did I realize I was talking to exactly the girl I wanted, but just a few years too early."

The confidence Claire Bloom felt about herself at 14 is now, seven years later, shared by a majority of the critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Even those who did not like Charles Chaplin's self-conscious new film, Limelight, showered Claire, his leading lady, with such adjectives as "poignant," "delightful," "brilliant," "touching," "charming," "perfect." This week in London, Claire is winding up the second month of a triumphant Romeo and Juliet at the historic Old Vic theater. She has been hailed as the most enchanting Juliet in memory.

Single-Minded. Claire Bloom's sad, almost tragic sweetness, which wrings the hearts of her masculine audience and is the envy of more obviously beautiful but less accomplished actresses, was not bestowed on her by a fairy godmother. She worked for it. All she ever wanted to be was a great actress, in the Bernhardt and Duse tradition. She has emptied her life of everything except the theater. While other little girls learned about life by playing, she was learning her trade by working at it. She still works at it—and long past union hours. To improve her carriage, she studies ballet. To improve her speaking voice, she studies singing. To improve her actress' understanding, she reads endlessly, from Euripides to Shaw.

Says Chaplin: "I tested hundreds of girls for Limelight. They were all very pretty, very candy-box, very deadpan, but not what I needed. Claire has distinction, an enormous range, and, underneath her sadness, there is this bubbling humor, so unexpected, so wistful." Claire is a pretty girl, but no beauty: the quality that makes critics and plainer-spoken men yearn over her is charm—a charm to whose single-minded cultivation she has devoted her whole, determined young life. One critic has compared this quality to "the wistful beauty of a lonely blossom of wood sorrel." Of her Juliet, another wrote that she gives "a sweet new agony to the supreme love-drama in the English language." A third tried to describe her as having "the air of being untouched by human hands. She has, quite instinctively, an uncrushable air of absolute innocence."