VERNA BLOOM

(7 August 1938 - 9 January 2019)

The American actress Verna Bloom, who has died aged 80 from complications with dementia, had a fairly short career in movies, just ten titles in toto, but she also had a career in television and the theatre. She was born to Russian Jewish parents in Massachusetts, graduated from Boston University and later studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio for actors in New York. She worked at the Bar Harbour Theatre in Maine and also co-founded the Trident Playhouse in Denver. Replacing Glenda Jackson in the Broadway production of Marat/Sade led to her first big screen appearance in Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler’s film about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, with Robert Forster. Peter Fonda directed her in his Western The Hired Hand and then Clint Eastwood cast her in his High Plains Drifter (1973). She appeared with Robert Duvall in Howard Koch’s cop movie Badge 373 and later on was one of many budding stars in the original National Lampoon's Animal House directed by John Landis. Other names included Tom Hulce, Kevin Bacon, John Belushi, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen, Donald Sutherland and John Vernon. She worked with Eastwood again on Honkytonk Man, appeared in The Journey of Natty Gann and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. She played Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), her last film. In between movies, Verna Bloom worked on TV in Bonanza, Kojak, Police Story, Cagney and Lacey, The Equalizer, Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman and The West Wing, among others. She was married twice, first to Richard Collier and then to the writer Jay Cocks from 1972. They have one child.

MICHAEL DARVELL