Anna Steiger was put off acting by her parents, Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. “I knew what a rotten, stinking profession acting can be,” she says. “And I didn’t want to be compared to them.”
The Hollywood couple’s only child, product of a decade-long marriage that straddled the Sixties, Anna can remember the sheer trauma of Bloom’s treading the boards in acclaimed roles such as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, “She’d be exhausted, wrung out – then she’d have only one day off.”
Meanwhile, her father’s depression meant that the film industry left him out in the cold for chunks of the Eighties. “We were very similar characters. We both had a lot of exuberance and a lot of depression back and forth. He was much more of a larger-than-life character than I was, though, and he had to be really because he struggled from nothing to get where he got.” Rod Steiger was brought up in poverty by an alcoholic single mother. “He was a fighter,” remembers his daughter, now 64.
Anna decided to become a singer instead – which, with operas staged in repertory, is without the incessant demands of theatre or film set. First as a soprano, more recently as a mezzo, she can be seen this summer at Grange Park Opera, playing the “old bag” the Marquise of Berkenfield in Donizetti’s deliciously daft comedy, La fille du Régiment (Daughter of the Regiment in English – the language Grange Park’s production is being performed in). Having specialised in Rossini and Mozart, Steiger’s a defender of comic operas such as Fille. “You can always get the odd belly laugh out of an audience if it is well enough sung and directed,” she says. For Wasfi Kani, CEO of Grange Park, Steiger is a thrilling signing this season: “All my life people have told me about this phenomenal performer Anna Steiger. People raved about her as a singer and a huge acting presence.” Steiger has had no trouble stepping out of her parents’ shadow.
Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom were both stars at their zenith during Anna’s childhood. Mother and father would take their daughter on their respective film sets, including those of the gorgeous Roman film studios Cinecittà – Bloom made a number of Italian films during this period – but to Anna it was normal.
“Being on a film set is one of the most boring places in the world,” she tells me over lunch in a cafe round the corner from Grange Park’s London rehearsal rooms, something of a remove from the pretty house and gardens of the opera house itself, which is based near Guildford. Steiger is warm, easy company. She was glad of her nanny, a Frenchwoman her mother hired before she was born, who arrived when she was a baby and stayed until she was 14. She would grow up with French as her first language as a result.
Steiger would begin studying piano as a child and showed sufficient skill to get into the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London after she and her mother moved there from New York when she was 14. Her singing ability emerged at the college, and she switched to it.
As her career took off she gained the most surprising of acolytes. The novelist Philip Roth was Claire Bloom’s third husband and his treatment of Steiger as a teenager is well documented. When he moved into mother and daughter’s London house in Chelsea in 1977 he asked Bloom to ask her daughter to leave it – at 18. “There are reasons for dormitories and university residence halls,” is one of the choice phrases in his letter to Bloom on the matter. “There is a richness to our lives that simply withers away when we have to deal with the daily problems [of life with Anna],” is another. Roth argued mother and daughter didn’t get along. Of Roth’s behaviour now, Steiger says, “he just didn’t like teenagers or children or anything else. He came along when I was 16, I was playing the piano all the time – it was loud – and when I wasn’t doing that I was playing rock music with friends… I was a pain in the arse to him.
“I think he didn’t want anybody around who was not doing what he wanted. I think he wanted to control the house and I was in the way.”
She speaks with such little apparent resentment on the matter that it’s startling when she makes it clear she didn’t forgive him. “It ruined our relationship,” she says. “As it would.”
Despite all this, Roth became a fan of her as a singer. “The other side of the story is that once I became good he was really into my career – it was strange, it rather surprised me actually. He came to my premieres. He was really interested. He’d turn up at all the things I did.
Steiger is keen, however, to give credit where credit’s due: “He would say things if he thought they could be improved – which were always very perceptive, I must say.”
Why the volte face, was it guilt?
“No, I don’t think he ever felt guilt,” she says with a laugh, and some emphasis.
“I think I needed to be good at something and once I was outstanding at something I was interesting… and apparently the world concurred at that moment.”
Any falling out with Bloom, who yielded to Roth’s request for her daughter’s ejection, has long since been left behind. “Oh yes, we patched things up very quickly. I think we have a very good rapport now, in the last 30 years.” Steiger divides her time between a flat in Paris and living on the top floor of her mother’s house in Fulham; she is single and has never had children. Bloom, at 93, is still going strong, save for failing eyesight. She will certainly attend her daughter’s Grange Park debut. In part, Steiger has taken the role so that her mother and English friends can see her perform – most of her work is on the continent these days, and often in France. Her attachment to the country comes not just from the nanny but from the fact that wherever she and her parents lived when she was small, she would be sent to the local lycée, for continuity.
But there’s somewhere that feels more familiar still. She may feel she has rejected the pressures of her pedigree but confesses, “It’s fun to be on stage, I feel at home there, I grew up there in many ways.”
Daughter of the Regiment is in repertory at Grange Park Opera from June 8. Info: grangeparkopera.co.uk.
Telegraph subscribers can go online on June 4 to hear Sir Bryn Terfel and Wynne Evans discuss the upcoming season at Grange Park Opera and perform some of their favourite pieces. To book: telegraph.co.uk/events