sábado, 15 de abril de 2017

Claire Bloom


DE OTROS MUNDOS

Claire Bloom 

(1931)


Claire Bloom English is a dramatic actress noted for her moving portrayals of Shakespearean heroines. She also played on stage, television, and in films.


Synopsis

Claire Bloom was born in London on February 15, 1931. At age 14 she tried out for the part of Juliet with the company of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; in 1948 she was cast as Ophelia in Hamlet. She won praise for her early movie role in Limelight (1952). She successfully combined a stage career with films, and continued to star in films and on television into the 21st century.





I like to work in Hollywood, 

but I don't want to live there. 
I'm too young to die.
Claire Bloom



Age has not taken the flower off this Bloom. The well-known and respected stage, screen and television actress Claire Bloom, originally named Patricia Claire Blume, continues to be in demand as a septuagenarian actress and looks as beautiful as ever.



She was born Patricia Claire Bloom on February 15, 1931 in Finchley, North London, to Elizabeth (Grew) and Edward Max Blume, who worked in sales. Her parents were both from Jewish families (from Belarus). Educated at Badminton School in Bristol and Fern Hill Manor in New Milton, Claire expressed early interest in the arts and was stage trained as an adolescent at the Guildhall School, under the guidance of Eileen Thorndike, and then the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Marking her professional debut on the BBC radio, she subsequently took her first curtain call with the Oxford Repertory Theatre in 1946 in the production of "It Depends What You Mean". She then received early critical accolades for her Shakespearean ingénues in "King John", "The Winter's Tale" and, notably, her Ophelia in "Hamlet" at age 17 at Stratford-on-Avon opposite alternating Hamlets Paul Scofield and Robert Helpmann. By 1949 Claire was making her West End debut with "The Lady's Not For Burning" with the up-and-coming stage actor Richard Burton.

A most becoming and beguiling dark-haired actress whose photogenic, slightly pinched beauty was accented by an effortless elegance and poise, Claire's inauspicious film debut came with a prime role in the British courtroom film drama The Blind Goddess (1948). It was her second film, when Charles Chaplin himself selected her specifically to be his young leading lady in the classic sentimental drama Candilejas (1952), that propelled her to stardom. Her bravura turn as a young suicide-bent ballerina saved from despair by an aging music hall clown (Chaplin) was exquisitely touching and sparked an enviable but surprisingly sporadic career in films.

Despite the sudden film attention, Claire continued her formidable presence on the Shakespearean stage. Joining the Old Vic Company for the 1952-1953 and 1953-1954 seasons, she appeared as Helena, Viola, Juliet, Jessica, Miranda, Virgilia, Cordelia and (again) Ophelia in a highly successful tenure. Touring Canada and the United States as Juliet, she made her Broadway bow in the star-crossed lover role in 1956, also playing the Queen in "Richard II". A strong presence on both the London and New York stages over the years, other powerful performances came with "The Trojan Women", "Vivat! Vivat! Regina!", "Hedda Gabler", "A Doll's House" and "A Streetcar Named Desire". Much later in life she performed in a superb one-woman show entitled "These Are Women: A Portrait of Shakespeare's Heroines" that included monologues from several of her acclaimed stage performances.

Claire's stylish and regal presence was simply ideal for mature period films and she appeared opposite a roster of Hollywood most talented leading men as such, including Laurence Olivier in the title role of Ricardo III (1955); Richard Burton and Fredric March in Alejandro el Magno (1956); Yul Brynner in Los hermanos Karamazov (1958) and Brynner and Charlton Heston in the DeMille epic Los bucaneros (1958) in which she had a rare dressed-down role as a spirited pirate girl. On the more contemporary scene she appeared with Burton in two classic film dramas: the stark "kitchen sink" British stage piece Mirando hacia atrás con ira (1959) and the Cold War espionage thriller El espía que surgió del frío (1965). In addition she courted tinges of controversy playing a housewife gone bonkers in the offbeat sudser Confidencias de mujer (1962) and a lesbian in the supernatural chiller La casa encantada (1963).

Claire met first husband Rod Steiger while performing with him on stage in 1959's "Rashomon". They married that year and had daughter Anna in 1960 who grew up to become a well-regarded opera singer. Claire and Rod appeared in two lesser films together, El hombre ilustrado (1969) and Tres no caben en dos (1969), both released the same year they divorced after 10 tumultuous years.

As with other maturing actress during the 1970s, Claire looked toward classy film roles in TV-movies for sustenance and found among them Backstairs at the White House (1979), as First Lady Edith Wilson, and Retorno a Brideshead (1981), in which she was nominated for an Emmy. Also lauded were the epic miniseries La isla de Ellis (1984); a remake of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables (1983), and Philip Roth's acclaimed adaptations of American Playhouse: The Ghost Writer (1984) and Shadowlands (1985), the latter earning her a British Television Award. Speaking of Roth, Claire married the writer (her third) in 1990 after a brief second marriage to producer Hillard Elkins (1969-1972). The union with Roth lasted five years. Claire appeared in several Shakespearean teleplays over the decades while also portraying a choice selection of historical royals including Czarina Alexandra and Katherine of Aragon. One of her most recent appearances on TV was the miniseries version of Los diez mandamientos (2006). On daytime drama, she delightfully played matriarch and murderess Orlena Grimaldi on the daytime drama As the World Turns (1956) in 1993. She left the role in 1995 and was replaced.

Claire wrote two memoirs. The first was the more career-oriented "Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress", released in 1982 Her more controversial second book focused on her personal life: "Leaving a Doll's House: A Memoir", published in 1996.

Gary Brumburgh 



I think that few professions have so much to do 
with chance and so little to do with the calculation of will.
Claire Bloom


From then on I thought only of going into the theatre and playing in Chekhov. . . . Chekhov was moving. That's what I was looking for—something more moving even than my own plight as a little English girl driven from my home by the Gods of War.
Claire Bloom


PERSONAL LIFE
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. 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.

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 also her affairs with Richard BurtonLaurence Olivier, and Yul Brynner. The book created a stir when Bloom described her marriage with Philip Roth. Soon after, Roth wrote a "revenge novel" I Married a Communist (1998), in which the character of Eve Frame appeared to represent Bloom.



Claire Bloom 'to star as mother of Doctor Who'

Claire Bloom, the Hollywood actress discovered by Charlie Chaplin, is to play the mother of Doctor Who in the BBC sci-fi series, it has been reported.



Claire Bloom 'to star as mother of Doctor Who'
Claire Bloom will appear next year alongside David Tennant, in his final outing as Doctor Who Photo: GETTY


Bloom, who has starred with and romanced some of Hollywood's greatest actors in a 60-year career, will appear next year alongside David Tennant, in his final outing as the Doctor.
"It is happening. They are filming at the moment. I have been organising her schedule," her manager in America, Marion Rosenberg, is reported to have told the Daily Mail.
Bloom, 78, who lives alone in Fulham, north London, rose to prominence after being chosen by Charlie Chaplin to appear in his film Limelight in 1952. She is said to be excited by her new role.
A friend of the actress told the newspaper: "The script is a very closely guarded secret, as the producers are desperate for Claire's appearance to be a surprise."
Bloom is well known for playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in both London and New York. She desribed the role as her favourite.
She had a relationship with Richard Burton after they appeared together in Hamlet, Look Back In Anger and in the film The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
She was married three times, first to the actor Rod Steiger, next to the producer Hillard Elkins and finally to the novelist Philip Roth.
A BBC spokesman declined to comment.





lunes, 10 de abril de 2017

Bob Carlos Clarke


Bob Carlos Clarke
Photo by Scarlett Carlos Clarke 

Bob Carlos Clarke

(1950-2006) 

"One of the great photographic image-makers 
of the last few decades"
Terence Pepper, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery


Bob Carlos Clarke was born in Cork, Ireland in 1950, and came to England in 1964 to study art and design at The West Sussex College of Art where he developed an interest in photography. He then went on to The London College of Printing, before completing his degree at the Royal College of Art in 1975.

He worked in almost every sphere of photography, winning numerous awards for his high-profile advertising campaigns, recognition for his photojournalism and portraits of celebrities, and international acclaim from collectors of fine prints.

Bob Carlos Clarke produced six books: The Illustrated Delta of Venus (1979), Obsession (1981), The Dark Summer (1985), White Heat (1990), Shooting Sex (2002), and Love Dolls Never Die (2004).



Photo by Bob Carlos Clarke 

Bob Carlos Clarke (24 June 1950 – 25 March 2006), was born in Cork, Ireland. A prolific photographer, described as “Britain’s answer to Helmut Newton”, in his short life he had a strong impact upon and influenced the development of photography from the late 20th Century through to the present day.

He was sent to an all-male boarding school in England at a young age and this experience influenced his photography and his choice of subject matter, both as a student and new photographer and then later in adult life.

After finishing secondary education he went to Dublin for a year, working in various low level positions at advertising agencies and newspapers as a trainee journalist. After a brief spell in Belfast in 1969, Carlos Clarke moved to England in the latter half of 1970 and enrolled in the Worthing College of Art. It was here that he met his first wife Sue Frame, knowing that she was a part-time model he “knew he had to become a photographer without delay” and persuaded her to pose for him on a chromed 650cc Triumph Bonneville.

In 1975, a couple of years after this photograph was taken, they married at Kensington Registry Office. By this time they had already made the move to London, more specifically Brixton, where Carlos Clarke enrolled in the London College of Printing. He later went on to complete an MA from the Royal College of Art in photography, graduating in 1975. He initially began photographing nudes as a means of making money; using his fellow students as models he shot for Paul Raymond Publications, Men Only and Club International. Having exhausted the college of beauty he turned to model agencies and discovered that it was possible to flick through a catalogue and essentially ‘order’ a girl from a picture.

It was at this time that his relationship with Sue was beginning to wane and he spent periods renting separately from her. He rented in Brixton before purchasing half a house in Balham for £9,500. Limitations on space meant that his photographic style had to adapt, as he was unable to take a whole picture in one take and as a result began to use photomontage to create homemade fantasies. Carlos Clarke says of the time “visitors to my grand apartment had to tiptoe around a labyrinth of cut-up scraps of photographs, pots of glue and scattered scalpels”. This method saw him take photographs everywhere he went, “of skylines, doorways, highways, rocks, ruins, rivers – anything I might use later in a composition”. The next stage of this process was the purchase of a deVillbiss airbrush and a compressor to spray inks and chemicals”.

He writes of the time “working in such confined and ill-equipped spaces was most hellish. One of my darkrooms was a tiny bedroom adjacent to a railway where I had to time my exposure to avoid the vibration of passing trains”. It was at this time and working in such conditions that Carlos Clarke discovered what he termed ‘chemical abuse’ – flinging chemicals across prints to distress the image. He was photographer who was not to be limited by the two-dimensionality of the photographic print. As a photographer he became fairly obsessed with achieving the ‘perfect’ image. A neurotic and obsessive printer, Carlos Clarke would make the same image again and again convinced that they could be improved. As a result he has left behind a legacy of a great many prints of similar images with different effects of colouring. He left his cramped flat and moved to Wimbledon Village and from there to a bright apartment overlooking Earl’s Court Square. His marriage to Sue had disintegrated and he was now dating Lindsey Rudland, a model at the time, they had met through a mutual friend. They lived together in Earl’s Court and ran a professional darkroom and studio in the space. Eventually they would marry in St Vincent in 1997.

Carlos Clarke’s first encounter with photographing models in rubber and latex was an experience with a gentleman called ‘The Commander’, a publisher of a magazine for devotees of rubber wear who had contacted Carlos Clarke to shoot for his publication. The artist Allen Jones was a good friend of Bob Carlos Clarke. His work drew heavily on fetishism and he advised the younger photographer to lay off the fetish scene. Despite this Carlos Clarke devoted the following decade to shooting women in high heels. What he liked about rubber and vinyl “was the way it contained a body, concealing imperfections and defining contours beneath a gleaming synthetic skin”. Once they’d mastered the technique of getting it on, the models loved it; “it became a new and exciting ritual, a way of being simultaneously exposed and impenetrable”. Carlos Clarke worked with ‘Daniel James of London’ for five years on creating rubber and synthetic outfits. They also collaborated to create a mail-order catalogue called ‘Maid in London’. Daniel James’s work became thematic to Bob’s second book ‘The Dark Summer’ (Quartet, 1985) and it was Daniel who created the mermaid’s tail for Bob’s iconic image “Fantasy Females Are Impossible To Satisfy” (2004).

As a professional photographer the cameras that Bob liked to use included the Pentax 6.45, Olympus OM4ti and Pentax 6x7s and Fuji 6x9s. He detested the emergence of digital photography, which gave everyone the impression they were the next Cartier-Bresson. However, he is quoted as saying that the reason for him being “vehemently anti-digital” is “a self defence mechanism, because I don’t understand it”. Expanding upon this in the same interview he explained; “with digital the problem is that there is no end to the options. And that’s where people fall down. They lose sight of the fact that the image has to happen in the eye, the mind and the camera, at the right time”.

Carlos Clarke did not only shoot women, some of his best known photographs are of men; notably Keith Richards, Vinnie Jones and Marco Pierre White. His relationship with Marco Pierre White saw the chef and photographer collaborate on White Heat (Octopus, 1990). The White Heat cookbook, published in 1990, featured recipes by Marco Pierre White alongside photographs of White by Carlos Clarke. The photographer hung out at Harvey’s; Marco Pierre White’s restaurant, for a year or so taking photographs on his 35mm Polapan. The book is cited today as having influenced the careers of several Michelin starred and celebrity chefs and has been described by one critic as “possible the most influential recipe book of the last 20 years”.

Carlos Clarke did not like using recognizable faces and known models. One of his most iconic mages ‘Masked Blonde’ (1996) is a photograph of the model Caprice, who was represented by Ghislain Pascal who later became the photographer’s agent. Yet he did not entitle the work with reference to her, he wanted the model to remain anonymous. Philippe Garner, Head of Photography at Christies, in discussion on Bob’s photography observed; “Partly what intrigued me about the pictures is whether he is photographing what he desires or photographing what he fears, and I suspect the answer is both.

He moved to his first “grown up studio” at The Village in Battersea, London in 1996 – a disused Victorian school in South London, which became the centre of his world with its enormous studio, darkroom, office and apartment – rented to many other photographers as well.

Carlos Clarke had two solo exhibitions of his work during his lifetime, including one at Hamiltons Gallery entitled Styx (1991). It was this exhibition that represented a pinnacle for Carlos Clarke and it resulted in him being “famous in a way that he had never been”. Philippe Garner commented on the exhibition, “his name was carrying some resonance with the broader public and with keen amateur photographers” . His daughter Scarlett was born the day after the opening.

His ‘Love Dolls Never Die’ exhibition in 2004 at Eyestorm Gallery was his debut into digital photography. The pictures were all shot on film, but they were enhanced digitally. It was also a satirical commentary on the fad at the time for retouching fashion and glamour images to such an extent that the skin appears plastic as well as the proliferation of plastic surgery. Carlos Clarke described the exhibition as “the antithesis of everything I’ve ever preached. I’ve gone for brutal clarity and intense manipulation. It’s a complete fusion of old and new technology: traditional darkroom ‘wet’ processes and state of the art Photoshop retouching. The files are huge and are going to be printed about five foot high”. The exhibition toured to Spain with exhibitions in both Madrid (2005) and Barcelona (2006). This exhibition was his most successful, outselling all his previous shows put together.

In explanation for the small number of exhibitions had during his lifetime Bob once said; “I stopped exhibiting because I’ve had so many problems with galleries. Most charge 50 per cent commission on sales and if that’s not bad enough, many would often fail to pay what they owed. It came to a point that you were putting on an exhibition, selling pictures and then having to fight to get paid”.

He produced six books during his career: The Illustrated Delta of Venus (W H Allen, 1980), Obsession (Quartet, 1981), The Dark Summer (Quartet, 1985), White Heat (Octopus, 1990), andShooting Sex (self-published, 2002), ‘Love Dolls Never Die’ (self-published, 2004), and one DVD ‘Too Many Nights’ (Panoramica, 2006) During his lifetime Carlos Clarke, due in part to his own insecurity, did not believe that his skills and remarkable talent as a photographer had been recognised. Yet, he was a big star at the annual national photo expos, with young photographers packing the lecture halls. Indeed, Philippe Garner, Head of Photography at Christies believes that Carlos Clarke deserves a significant place in the annals of British photography.

Bob Carlos Clarke committed suicide on the 25th March 2005. Terence Pepper, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery described Carlos Clarke as "one of the great photographic image-makers of the last few decades".



GALLERY