From Claire Bloom - Leaving a Doll's House memoir
In 1964, I was asked to appear in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.......His fees were stratospheric and his power was enormous. He could certainly have vetoed my appearance had he wished; I was surprised when he chose not to.
I had mixed emotions about making this movie: I knew my feeling for Richard was still strong. I had to face the simple truth that where I had failed, another woman had succeeded....That Elizabeth Taylor was considered to be one of the most beautiful women in the world made her no small trophy; Richard believed that he had won a paragon among women.
During filming he told me more than once that to wake up and find Elizabeth on his pillow was like having Christmas every morning — a sentiment that raised in me urges akin to murder.
In the studio, Richard and I behaved with the greatest circumspection: even so, as I came to learn much later from various printed accounts of their lives — and with some pleasure, I must admit, Taylor was extremely upset by my reappearance in Richard's life.
Subsequently, she was always on hand during our scenes together. Her commanding, if unmusical, call for "Richard!*' sent him running to her side.
I believe that Richard, during those early days of their marriage, was terrified of his wife. Certainly he behaved in ways unlike his former self.
He was still drinking very hard. A slight tremor in his hands early in the morning was always lessened by that first cup of "coffee," sipped from a mug emitting a whiff of something stronger. That was around nine; at noon he was drinking Champagne in his dressing room, followed by several bottles of wine, whichhe consumed with his cronies at lunch.
By late afternoon, Richard was pretty well out of commission. When I held his arm in our first scene together, it wasn't the powerful arm I remembered holding not so many years before; like the spirit of the sturdy miner's son I had known and loved, the muscle tone had vanished.
Richard's memory for poetry had been phenomenal when he was slightly younger, he now had trouble memorizing the script. The final scene of the movie, which should have been shot in a single night session, extended over three nights. Unable to remember his lines, Richard ended up having his part written on cue cards and stuck all over the interior of the car in which we were shooting.
