Verna Bloom

Verna Frances Bloom (August 7, 1938 – January 9, 2019) was an American actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1967 to 1983. She was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, into a Russian Jewish family. Her father, Milton, ran a grocery store, and her mother, Sara (Damsky) Bloom, managed the household before taking over the family grocery business following her parents' divorce and later working in bookkeeping for a trucking company.

Bloom pursued formal training in the arts, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts at Boston University in 1959. She subsequently studied acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York City. Before establishing herself in New York, she and her first husband, Richard Collier, co-founded the Trident Theater in Denver, Colorado, which operated from 1963 to 1965. The two later separated by 1969.

Her Broadway debut came in 1967 when she portrayed Charlotte Corday in 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. She returned to Broadway in 1983, playing Blanche Morton in Brighton Beach Memoirs. Her screen career encompassed more than 30 film and television appearances beginning in the 1960s. She made her film debut in Medium Cool and went on to co-star opposite Clint Eastwood in the 1973 western High Plains Drifter. In 1974 she appeared in the television film Where Have All the People Gone? alongside Peter Graves and Kathleen Quinlan. Among her most recognized film roles were Marion Wormer in Animal House (1978) and Mary, mother of Jesus, in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

In 1972, Bloom married film critic Jay Cocks. The couple had a son, Sam, born in 1981, and remained married until her death. Bloom died on January 9, 2019, in Bar Harbor, Maine, at the age of 80, from complications of dementia.