- published: 04 Jun 2014
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Barry Nelson (April 16, 1917 – April 7, 2007) was an American actor, noted as the first actor to portray Ian Fleming's secret agent James Bond.
Nelson was born Robert Haakon Nielsen in San Francisco, California, of Norwegian ancestry, the son of Betsy (née Christophsen) and Trygve Nielsen. (His year of birth has been reported variously, but his 1943 Army enlistment record and his 1993 voter registration records certify 1917 as the correct year of his birth.) He began acting in school at the age of fifteen. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1941 and, because of his theatrical efforts in school, was almost immediately signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
As an MGM contract player, Nelson made his screen debut in the role as Paul Clark in Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, with Donna Reed. He followed that with his role as Lew Rankin in the film noir crime/drama Johnny Eager (1942) starring Robert Taylor and Lana Turner.He played the lead in an MGM second feature war film A Yank on the Burma Road. (1942)
Claire Bloom (born Patricia Claire Blume; 15 February 1931) is an English film and stage actress.
Bloom was born in the North London suburb of Finchley, the daughter of Elizabeth (née Grew) and Edward Max Blume, who worked in sales. Her paternal grandparents, originally named Blumenthal, as well as her maternal grandparents, originally named Gravitzky, were Jewish immigrants from Byten, In the Grodno region of Russia, now in Belarus, Eastern Europe. Bloom attended secondary school at the independent Badminton School in Bristol, Gloucestershire.
After training at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Central School of Speech and Drama, Bloom made her debut on BBC radio programmes. She made her stage debut in 1946, when she was 15, with the Oxford Repertory Theatre. Her London stage debut was in 1947 in the hit Christopher Fry play The Lady's Not For Burning, which also featured the young Richard Burton, starred John Gielgud and Pamela Brown and which, subsequently, was produced, with the aforementioned four, on Broadway in New York. The following year, she received great acclaim for her portrayal of Ophelia in Hamlet, the first of many works by William Shakespeare in which Bloom would appear.