Bloom Recalls Actresses’ Bard Times

“I’m trying to make it tasty,” says actress Claire Bloom, who’s not describing a recipe.

Indeed, Bloom’s talking about spicing up “Enter the Actress,” her one-woman show chronicling the obstacles, sexual and otherwise, that British actresses faced centuries ago to pave the way for careers like hers.

Just as contemporary actresses have had to battle against the casting couch, “they were considered fair prey” more than 300 years ago, Bloom said, “and backstage was open to anybody who wanted to pay to come to their dressing rooms. The theater was like a brothel.”

Bloom, who has played many of drama’s great female roles, will give the West Coast premiere of “Enter the Actress” on Thursday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

She’s flying in for the performance from New York, where she’s starring in a critically acclaimed contemporary staging of Sophocles’ “Electra,” one of Broadway’s hottest tickets. She plays Electra’s imperious mother, Clytemnestra.

The actress, 67, first shot to fame in Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 film “Limelight.” She went on to portray Nora in “A Doll’s House” on London’s West End, Lady Anne in the 1955 Laurence Olivier-Ralph Richardson-John Gielgud film version of “Richard III” and Lady Marchmain in BBC television’s “Brideshead Revisited.”

The timing of the Southland show, which she first performed early last year, couldn’t be better. As the hit movie “Shakespeare in Love” makes eminently clear, women were banned from the stage during Elizabethan times, and Bloom opens by reenacting a scene from one of the Bard’s classics as it would have been performed at its premiere.

“I begin the evening with a portrait of myself as Viola in ‘Twelfth Night’ as a boy,” she said, “and end with a portrait of myself as Juliet. I do the balcony scene.”

Speaking in a breathy, English accent from her Manhattan home, the actress said she also uses narration and slides to illuminate the personal and professional lives of pioneering actresses from the 16th through the 19th centuries.

Other scenes she reenacts, by English dramatists Wycherly and Congreve, were identified with such theatrical doyennes as Nell Gwyn, Sarah Siddons and Fanny Kemble, who in the early 1800s made her debut in “Romeo and Juliet” at 21, the same age Bloom was when she first took that same role at London’s Old Vic.

Three years ago, the actress made literary headlines with a scathing, tell-all memoir, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” about her stormy 17-year relationship with bestselling author Philip Roth.

She titillated the publishing world by writing, among other things, that Roth forced her daughter from a previous marriage out of their house, then gave Bloom a $62-billion bill upon their 1995 divorce, arguing that she’d refused to honor a prenuptial agreement.

In October, Roth published a new novel, widely considered an equally disemboweling payback. In “I Married a Communist,” the main character’s life is destroyed when his ex-wife writes a tell-all revealing that he’s a Communist.

Yet, while Bloom’s book hit the bestseller list, she flatly refused to discuss the imbroglio, her tone hardening over the phone.

On the subject of men, though, she did heartily agree that most didn’t have it so great in early theater, either.

History has it that discrimination stemmed from the medieval idea, held by the all-powerful Catholic Church, that anything less than real was evil. Even Plato called theater--which, of course, is pure fiction--a lie.

Hence, “Society did value [actors’ talent],” Bloom said, “but they were thought to be outside society, ungentlemanly.”

Still, because women had far fewer rights, they had it much worse. Further, the idea of a man and a woman appearing on stage together was more than the church could bear.

“The actress didn’t actually appear on the English stage until, I’d say, 1660,” Bloom said. “Theater was banned totally under [mid-17th century Commonwealth leader Oliver] Cromwell. He was a Puritan, and they banned all kinds of amusements.”

Later, during the Restoration, actresses whom Bloom flatteringly called “wonderfully lusty women,” often earned their keep as prostitutes or became mistresses to noblemen and royalty.

In one of her favorite moments of the show, she recounts an anecdote about the bawdy, bumptious Gwyn, a cockney street girl who became Charles II’s mistress.

The story goes that Gwyn, disturbed by a noise, called down from her window high within the palace to discover its cause. When a coachman replied that his fellow coachman “ ‘called you a whore, Miss Nell,’ she said, ‘Well, I am a whore--find something better to fight about!’ ”

Bloom’s inspiration for “Enter the Actress” was Kemble, niece of the great tragedienne Siddons and one of the first English actresses to tour the U.S. She married a Georgia plantation owner and, after a divorce, became an abolitionist before returning to the English stage.

Kemble’s career flourished during the early 19th century, a time of greater freedom for actresses, a few of whom were even serving as their own managers. If Bloom had to, that’s the era she said she’d relive.

“They were worshiped, those 19th century actresses,” she said. “There was no TV, no movies, no radio, and the great, great thing was to go to see a play. That must have been a great time for the theater.”

* Claire Bloom appears Thursday in “Enter the Actress” at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. 8 p.m. $11.50-$47. (800) 300-4345.