'Terror! Vice! Violence!" howls the poster for Claire Bloom's 1953 film The Man Between, co-starring James Mason as Ivo Kern, shadowy smuggler of secrets and people in postwar Berlin. In the poster, he is putting the moves on Bloom, whom the artist has depicted reclining in rumpled sheets, hair down, thighs bared.
"It is fairly misleading!" says Bloom when I show her the poster she's never seen before during lunch at a Kensington hotel. She's right. Carol Reed's follow-up to The Third Man is an existential meditation on human corruption. One that is being revived for a new audience.
Bloom was 22 at the time, and near the start of a remarkable career during which she would star with, among others, Chaplin, Gielgud, Burton, Olivier, Steiger, Brynner, Hopkins. "And some great women, too," she adds, such as Kathryn Hunter and Eileen Atkins. She was also on the brink of a romantic odyssey anatomised in her 1996 memoir Leaving a Doll's House. During it, she would marry three times (Rod Steiger, producer Howard Elkins and novelist Philip Roth), and have other affairs and dalliances, sometimes with her leading men, including Olivier, Burton and Brynner, not to mention a night of folly with Anthony Quinn.
Today, she is elegantly dressed and proves witty, friendly company; she is, generally, prepared to put up with the odd impertinent question. Only occasionally - say when asked about whether she and Burton were an item on the set of Alexander the Great - does she snap incontrovertibly: "Let's not talk about that." But moments later gives me the gossip anyway.
"I am," she tells me several times, "of a certain age" (she is 85), and that serves both as a get-out for her garrulousness and a justification for forgetting some of the details of her career. For instance, she can remember many things about the 63-year-old The Man Between, but not the name of the character she played.