Blanche DuBois, Anna Karenina and the true star who brought them to life

Claire Bloom is a much travelled lady.

Last year she was on the promotional circuit in the United States for The King’s Speech, in which she plays Queen Mary. Then, around the time of her 80th birthday in February, she was off again, this time to Tanzania. Last week she was in Vienna receiving an award recognising her film career.

This Friday she’s a guest of honour at the 17th annual Bradford International Film Festival (BIFF) where she will accept the festival’s lifetime achievement award. Last week it was Terry Gilliam’s turn. He called the BIFF Fellowship an “end of career” award. Bloom giggles.

“It used to be called the ‘open coffin’ award. Well, open coffin here I come! No, I don’t think of it that way at all. It’s a tribute and it’s nice that one’s work is recognised. I’m more than delighted.”

Like her contemporaries, from Judi Dench to Julie Christie, Claire Bloom has a timeless appeal. She enjoyed an astonishing run of films in the 50s and 60s, has played most of the “heavy” stage roles – everyone from Shakespeare’s Cordelia and Miranda via Juliet and Blanche DuBois – and partnered an impressive gallery of leading men including Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Rod Steiger, who became her first husband.

She’s about to start work on another film, so life is busier than ever. Does she still have ambitions?

“I don’t have real ambitions but I know I’m going to do a movie, which is very nice. I know this sounds odd but I’m playing Jerry Lewis’s wife. Everything comes out of the blue and this came out of the blue. I’m delighted to be working, quite honestly. It’s a nice part.”

There was a time when Claire Bloom was about the most ambitious young actress of her generation. I ask if she recognises the girl she was back then.

“I was awfully high-falutin’, you know,” she replies. “Oh yes, I recognise her. She was very sweet. A bit silly. Very earnest. Didn’t have much fun. Not social fun. My life was in my work then and in love affairs which it should be at that age. I’m not hard on her at all. I think she was rather touching.”

Period interviews with the young Claire Bloom point to a very serious-minded girl. And who could blame her for such aloofness? She had had the good fortune to be working with giants like Paul Scofield and then Chaplin, who whisked her to New York to be screen-tested as Terry, the suicidal young dancer in what would become Limelight.

“To this day I can’t believe that it happened. It was such an amazing thing. I knew that this was the chance of a lifetime. The minute I met him I absolutely adored him and wanted to play the part more than anything in the world. I knew I had to live up to it [and] I knew that I was going to get it, come hell or high water.”

Working for Chaplin meant acceding to his every whim since he had imagined totally when he wrote the script what he wanted the girl to do. “I did it most obediently and happily,” recalls Bloom from her London home.

“The approach that Chaplin had was probably very old-fashioned,” she recalls. “Nobody would direct an actor like that in the 50s: ‘Look up, look down, speak the line, put your hand down...’ it was like that. So it was completely different from anybody else. But I was absolutely ignorant of films and adored Chaplin. Anything he told me I would happily do.

“Nobody else had ever asked me to act like that. In a sense it was a straitjacket, but it didn’t seem to be when I see the performance. There are one or two things I do that I can hear Charlie’s voice telling me to do and I think ‘Oh God, I could have done that in a more naturalistic way’.

“It was a little mannered. But on the whole the style that he wanted of me fit the film so perfectly that it was perfect under the circumstances.”

From Chaplin to Olivier in his 1955 film of Richard III aged just 23. Richard’s seduction of the grieving Lady Anne has passed into movie lore. It is classical Shakespeare writ large on the movie screen. I suggest Bloom’s theatrical credentials made the experience rather more comfortable than she had been with the benignly dictatorial Chaplin.

“I had a little more confidence. Comfortable? No. I was acting opposite Britain’s greatest actor of the 20th-century, which I well knew. He was much older than me. So I was in tremendous awe of Olivier. I was very nervous that I wouldn’t quite come up to it [but] he obviously thought I could, and I did.”

She had a long love affair with Richard Burton when they were both starring in The Lady’s Not for Burning for John Gielgud on stage. Their relationship endured throughout the 1950s and movies as diverse as Alexander the Great and Look Back in Anger. Bloom remembers it as “a fiery time”.

“With his incredible gifts and brilliance and physical beauty, there was no question that Richard was the heir to Olivier,” she says. “I was only a kid of 18 when we were in The Lady’s Not for Burning. It wasn’t perfect because Richard was married but it was perfect in every other way. It was the most heightened and exciting time of my life and the most passionate in every way, theatrically as well as emotionally.”

Later there were affairs with Yul Brynner and Anthony Quinn (“a perfectly dreadful, dreadful man”) and collaborations with Paul Newman, Anthony Hopkins and George C. Scott. She partnered Hopkins on a film of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, as the anguished child-woman heroine Nora Helmer, and claims both she and Hopkins understood the nuances of the play.

“Most of us in some way have played these roles. Most women. I think I’m very much – or was – split between rather a childish person and an independent woman. They have fought a great deal in my psyche and my life. I didn’t have to reach very deeply into my subconscious to feel that this was a scene that I had played myself and I think Tony felt the same way, actually.”

Claire Bloom comes alive when discussing the roles she has played. She is particularly thrilled to hear that her 1961 portrayal of Anna Karenina, opposite a young, pre-007 Sean Connery as Vronsky, is included in the Bradford tribute.

“It’s every actress’s dream to play Anna Karenina. The book means so much to me. Anna is larger-than-life in a way that it’s hard to explain. All I know is she is. I was very moved when I was doing it by the terrible, terrible story. It’s a huge, huge drama. I really don’t know how I played it. Technically I am a complete dope. I hate to use the word ‘instinctive’ but I think I am an instinctive actor. I must have had immense energy. I did have immense ambition and I wanted to only do the best.”

So what was the role that defined her? Bloom’s answer is instantaneous: Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar named Desire.

“The play itself is so brilliant – such a dreamlike, terrible play; a play of language and emotion. It was the best part I’ve ever played and I think the best performance I ever gave.”

I suggest we talk about it when she arrives in Bradford. Spring is in the air but I warn her that she faces the prospect of Yorkshire’s unpredictable weather. Claire Bloom is not fazed.

“I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to put my warm sweaters on. And I’ll bring my boots.”

Claire Bloom appears at Bradford International Film Festival at 7pm on Friday, March 25. 0844 856 3797, www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk