Va-Va-Voom, It’s Verna Bloom

I’ve wanted to crow my enthusiasm for Verna Bloom (1938-2019) here for some time. Hers wasn’t a household name, but she gave so many incredible performances in enough important American movies that she ought to be. Over a career lasting around 50 years, she amassed only about a dozen movie credits, twice as many TV credits, and a couple of outings on Broadway, but there’s a thread of integrity through it. She obviously kept an iron grip on the tiller of her career. She did just wanted she wanted and she did it to her utmost.

Raised by Russian Jewish parents in Lynne, Mass. she graduated from BU in 1958. She married a guy named Richard Collier, and started a theatre in Denver with him called the Trident, which operated from 1963 to 1965. She studied further at Herbert Berghof Studios in New York. Her big break was being cast as Charlotte Corday in a 1967 Broadway revival of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (usually shortened to Marat/ Sade). This was not the seminal Peter Brook production, although she had studied that one obsessively, as she was working the box office at the theatre where it played.

Next Bloom was cast to star in one of my favorite movies, Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1968). Her performance is so authentic in that experimental cinéma vérité /semi-documentary excursion that you’ll swear she’s the actual hillbilly woman she portrays, much as Barbara Loden is so authentic in Wanda (1970). And though I had seen her in other performances in other films previously, I didn’t put them together when I first saw Medium Cool at NYU back in the ’90s. Anyway, two other guys were entranced with Bloom’s performance in that movie. Movie critic and screenwriter Jay Cocks, and his frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese. Cocks reached out to her for a magazine piece. Very shortly they were an item. She separated from Collier in 1969 and married Cox in 1970. Meantime the pair of them and Scorsese had appeared in the documentary Street Scenes 1970, made by the New York Cinetracts Collective. Scorsese would harness Bloom’s beguiling powers onscreen himself just twice. She plays that sexy older artist woman/ symbol of death who traps Griffin Dunne in paper mache at the end of After Hours (1985). And she plays no less than Mary, Mother of God in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Almost every one of Bloom’s screen projects were significant in some way. She was in Peter Fonda’s first movie after Easy Rider, the self-directed The Hired Hand (1971). She was in two Clint Eastwood movies, High Plains Drifter (1973) and Honky Tonk Man (1982). She plays the pivotal role of Dean Wormer’s wife in Animal House (1978), whom I hold to be the original MILF, much more so than the repulsive Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, and long before Jennifer Coolidge set hearts racing as Stifler’s Mom in American Pie. She also starred opposite Robert Duvall in the forgotten Badge 373 (1973), directed by Howard Koch, and was in numerous notable made-for-tv films, including the apocalyptic Where Have All the People Gone? (1974) with Peter Graves, the notorious Sarah T. — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975) with Linda Blair, Contract on Cherry Street (1977) with Frank Sinatra, and Playing for Time (1980) with Vanessa Redgrave.

Bloom also did TV guest shots, but only occasionally, on shows like Police Story,Kojak, Lou Grant, and Cagney & Lacey. After a 1993 appearance on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, she essentially retired, although she did return to tv a decade later for an episode of The West Wing.

Sadly, her final years were beset by dementia. She was 80 when she passed in 2019.