Verna Bloom, who
has died aged 80, was a vivacious, versatile American actress who emerged in
the late 1960s into a film industry that struggled to fully integrate her
talents. She memorably brandished scissors at Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (1973); as Dean
Wormer’s hot-to-trot wife Marion in Animal
House (1978), she flirted with Tim Matheson in the fresh produce aisle,
schooling a generation of teens in the difference between “sensuous” and
“sensual”. Yet her career would be stymied by Hollywood’s indifferent attitude
to ageing female performers. As she noted about Animal House, “It’s my first comedy role... I have friends who tell
me I’m the funniest woman in the world, but never give me a comedy role.”
She was born Verna
Frances Bloom on August 7, 1938 in the small town of Lynn, Massachusetts to grocer
Milton Bloom and his wife Sara (née
Damsky). She was a practical child, who took over running the family store
after her parents’ divorce; later, she worked as a bookkeeper for a haulage firm.
She developed an interest in acting while studying at Boston’s School of the
Fine Arts, and after training at New York’s Herbert Berghof Studio, eventually upped
sticks to Denver, where she and first husband Richard Collier founded the
Trident Playhouse. Even here, she was a hands-on presence, treading the boards while
simultaneously manning the box office, running PR campaigns and even acting as
the theatre’s janitor.
The multitasking
was either too much, or not enough: by the mid-1960s, Bloom had divorced
Collier and relocated to New York, aiming to make it big on Broadway. Her big
break came in 1967 when, as an understudy, she replaced an unwell Glenda
Jackson as Charlotte Corday in the Martin Beck Theatre’s staging of Marat/Sade. She booked her first TV role
in The Questions (1967), a one-hour
drama in NBC’s Experiment in Television
strand, then compiled multiple television credits, including an appearance on long-running
Western Bonanza in 1969. Around the
same time, she met Jay Cocks, the film critic and long-time Martin Scorsese
associate, who was to become her husband for the rest of her life.
As a couple, Bloom
and Cocks were at the heart of an emerging cinematic counterculture. (It was Bloom
who introduced Scorsese to Bob Dylan’s road manager Jonathan Taplin, producer
of the director’s Mean Streets (1973).)
Upon a recommendation from Studs Terkel, who’d seen her triumph in the 1967 run
of his Amazing Grace, Bloom was cast in
epochal docudrama Medium Cool (1969),
as the single mother thrust into the (terrifyingly real) tumult around the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago; a balloting quirk saw her nominated for both
Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics.
Thereafter, she filmed alongside Cocks and Harvey Keitel in Street Scenes (1970), Scorsese’s
document of the growing Vietnam protest movement.
Two striking roles
in notable Westerns followed. In The
Hired Hand (1971), Peter Fonda’s slightly undervalued directorial debut,
she was haunting as a wife faced with the return of the husband who’d
previously abandoned her. In High Plains
Drifter, she briefly appeared a match for Eastwood’s diabolically mysterious
stranger, hissing “I knew you were cruel, but I didn’t know how far you could
go” before being manhandled into the bedroom. Yet for all the impression she made,
she was quickly returned to small-screen roles: as the mother of a troubled
Linda Blair in starry afterschool special Sarah
T. (1975), then in passing, single-episode spots on Kojak (1976), Police Story
(1976) and Lou Grant (1977).
As Marion Wormer,
she flashed a mile-wide smile, impressing her young co-stars with her
willingness to enter so gamely into Animal
House’s hormonal free-for-all. Yet this notional comeback cued only fitful
career progress. She reunited with Eastwood on Honkytonk Man (1982) and returned to Broadway in 1984 as Aunt
Blanche in Brighton Beach Memoirs; Scorsesean
loyalty saw her cast first as the sculptress plastering Griffin Dunne in After Hours (1985), then as an
altogether lived-in Virgin Mary in The
Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Her remaining screen time was played out
on TV, with roles on The Equalizer
(1988/89), Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
(1993) and The West Wing (2003) as
the stepmother of Allison Janney’s press secretary C.J. Cregg.
In later life, she
was diagnosed with dementia, and it was from complications connected with the condition
that Bloom eventually passed. She was a devoted wife and mother, a keen animal
lover, and an enthusiastic cheerleader for Animal
House whenever it cropped up in the cultural conversation. (Her final
screen credit came with a short film on the comedy’s 25th
anniversary DVD release.) Speaking to the New
York Times, however, Cocks observed that the character Bloom most
identified with was The Hired Hand’s
Hannah: “A very independent, strong, sensual, vulnerable, demanding woman… A
lot of her was in that role.”
She is survived by
her husband and a son, Sam, a prosecutor in the New York County District
Attorney’s office.
Verna Bloom, born August 7, 1938,
died January 9, 2019.
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