Bernhardt, Sarah

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BERNHARDT, SARAH

BERNHARDT, SARAH (1844–1923), French stage actor.

The most famous woman in the world at the height of her popularity around 1900, Sarah Bernhardt (originally Henriette Rosine Bernard) was the most widely acclaimed stage actor who ever lived. Although many details of her life remain sketchy, she was almost certainly born in Paris in October 1844 to an unmarried Jewish woman from Amsterdam; her father may have been a French naval officer from Le Havre. Bernhardt's childhood was difficult; her mother, a courtesan, was an intermittent presence in her life. Baptized at the age of twelve, Sarah was educated in a convent school and considered becoming a nun; in 1860, with the help of a family friend, she entered France's great drama school, the Paris Conservatoire.

Bernhardt's career was slow to take off. Her 1862 debut at the Comédie Française, France's most prestigious theatrical troupe, went largely unnoticed, and the following year Bernhardt, known for her temper and moodiness, left the company because of a dispute with a more established actress. After the birth in 1864 of her only son, Maurice, probably fathered by a Belgian aristocrat, in 1866 Bernhardt joined the Odéon Theater, where she had her first great successes in Dumas's Kean (1868) and especially François Coppée's Le Passant (1869). But it was not until after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), during which she ran a clinic for wounded soldiers, that Bernhardt became a sensation, playing the Queen of Spain in the 1872 revival of Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas.

That same year Bernhardt was invited to rejoin the Comédie Française, where she received her first acclaim for classical roles, playing the title characters of the great French tragedian Racine's Andromaque (1873) and Phèdre (1874). After the triumphant 1877 revival of Hugo's Hernani, she became increasingly restless, and in 1879 she signed a contract with the American theatrical agent Edward Jarrett, who booked private engagements for her during a Comédie Française tour in London, where Bernhardt became the toast of the town. Upon returning to Paris she again resigned from the Comédie Française and in 1880 embarked upon a long series of foreign tours. Her travels in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, which continued intermittently until she was in her late seventies, earned unimaginable sums of money and raised her fame to unprecedented heights.

Back in Paris Bernhardt founded and directed several theatrical troupes, including L'Ambigu (1882), Porte Saint-Martin (1883), and Renaissance (1893). In 1898 she opened the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, henceforth her sole theatrical venue in Paris until her death in 1923. In 1915 her right leg was amputated because of chronic knee pain, but she continued to perform using a special chair. Among the roles associated with Bernhardt are Marguerite Gautier in Dumas's La Dame aux camélias, Joan in Paul Jules Barbier's Jeanne d'Arc, and several masculine roles, including Lorenzo de' Medici in Alfred de Musset's Lorenzaccio and Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Known as "the Golden Voice" for her extraordinary ability to deliver lines, Bernhardt also mesmerized audiences with her unsettling beauty and graceful movements. Legendary for her unfashionable thinness, she took on ingenue roles even as an elderly woman, and at sixty-five played teenager Joan of Arc. Afflicted with a strange combination of sickliness—she may have suffered from tuberculosis—and hyperactivity, Bernhardt was also a sculptor and painter; she was also, arguably, the world's first media star, cultivating her image as a charismatic, unpredictable trendsetter. Fans were eager to hear about every aspect of her personal and professional life, including her numerous (often famous) lovers, her extravagant taste in clothing and furniture, and her countless idiosyncrasies. From an early age she sometimes slept in

the silk-lined coffin in which she was ultimately buried, and she had herself photographed in it; she wrote a book about a balloon ride she took; and her menagerie of exotic pets included a monkey named Darwin.

Since the late twentieth century Bernhardt's career has been revisited especially by feminists. Some see her as a throwback figure of the seductress profiting from her feminine charms, while others consider her an example of the fin-de-siècle New Woman, the independent, self-supporting female. In 1882 Bernhardt did marry, but her husband, a Greek man named Jacques Damala, was a drug addict who died several years later, and in spite of the many men—and, probably, women—in her life, Bernhardt always retained her independence. A skillful self-promoter and master of publicity and "spin," Bernhardt earned—and spent—immense sums throughout her life. She is an early example of not only the marriage of entertainment and high capitalism, but also the commodification of a fabricated and carefully managed personal image.

See alsoFin de Siècle; Popular and Elite Culture.