Sarah Bernhardt

French actor

• Born: October 22, 1844
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: March 26, 1923
• Place of death: Paris, France

Bernhardt is generally regarded as the greatest female actor of the nineteenth century. She not only appeared in stage productions throughout Europe and America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also made sound recordings and films during the twentieth century. She was also a painter and sculptor of some accomplishment, a theater manager, and an author of books, poetry, and plays.

Early Life

Sarah Bernhardt’s mother was Jewish and her father was Roman Catholic. Her parents did not live together, and her mother earned her living as a courtesan, so young Sarah was placed in a boarding house (pensione). Soon, however, her father moved her to a Catholic convent. She remained there until she was thirteen and became a student at the Conservatoire de Musique et Declamation in Paris. Although she won second prize for tragedy in 1861 and second prize for comedy in 1862, she regarded the conservatory’s methods as antiquated. She left the conservatory in 1862 and accepted a contract with the national theater of France, the famed Comedie Francaise. However, her contract was canceled the following year because she could not get along with the more senior women actors. She then found work in burlesque at the Theatre Porte St-Martin and the Gymnase. During this period she became involved with the Belgium prince de Ligne and in 1864 had a child by him whom she named Maurice.

In 1867, when Bernhardt was twenty-two years old, she became a member of the company at the Odeon, where she found definite successes in roles such as Cordelia in a French translation of William Shakespeare’s play King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606), as Zanetto in François Coppée’s verse play, La Passant (1869), and as the queen in Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas (1838). Indeed, it was Hugo himself who called Bernhardt the girl with the Golden Voice (vox d’or)—a name that stayed with her throughout her life. Meanwhile, Bernhardt’s success was so immediate that she even gave a command performance for France’s Emperor Napoleon III. However, the Franco-Prussian War interrupted her rising career with the closing of the Paris theaters in 1870.

Life’s Work

Bernhardt’s major life’s work began in 1871, when peace was restored, and she left the Odeon to rejoin the Comedie Francaise, where her reputation steadily grew with each performance, including her especially praised lead performances in Jean Racine’s 1677 play Phèdre (1874) and as Dona Sol in Victor Hugo’s 1830 play Hernani (1877). Bernhardt’s powerful emotional acting, the beauty of her voice, and the realistic pathos of her death scenes brought her praise as France’s leading woman actor. In 1879, she began winning an international reputation when she took London by storm with a triumphal season at the Gaiety Theater. Her artistic endeavors in other fields were also becoming noticed, and in 1876 she exhibited her sculpting work at the Paris Salon, where she won an honorable mention. In 1880, she exhibited paintings at the Salon.

Bernhardt’s success on stage seemed to increase her already strained relationships with other members of the Comedie Francaise, and in 1880 she paid a large forfeit to break her contract with that theater. To pay that debt she gave a series of performances in London, followed by tours of Russia, Denmark, and the United States, where she became extremely popular. For her performances on this grand tour, she relied principally on the role of Camille in La Dame aux camélias, an 1852 dramatization of the 1848 novel by Alexander Dumas, fils. In 1882, she married Jacques Damala in London. The marriage lasted only a year.

Now a world-famous actor, Bernhardt returned to Paris for a triumphal production of Victorien Sardou’s new play Fedora at the Vaudeville Theatre. In 1883, she took over management of the Theatre Porte St-Martin, where she produced, among other important works, several of Sardou’s plays. She also wrote a play of her own, L’Aveu, a comedy that received only mildly favorable response. She managed the Theatre Porte St-Martin through a ten-year period during which she starred in several new productions and repeated many of her already famous roles. Her most celebrated role may have been that of the tragic title character in Victorien Sardou’s play Cleopatra, but she also received high praise for her sensitive performance as Joan of Arc in Jules Barbier’s 1873 opera Jeanne d’Arc. In 1893, she gave up her management of Porte St-Martin to become the proprietor of the Renaissance Theatre.

In addition to managing Paris theaters, Bernhardt made several foreign tours. In 1891 and 1893, she toured both North and South America, Australia, and most of the chief European cities. By then, she was, without doubt, the toast of the Western world. In November, 1893, she opened the season at the Renaissance Theatre with Jules Lemaitre’s Les Rois. During the next few years she divided her time between Paris and London and in 1896 again toured the United States.

In December of 1896, a great celebration was organized in her honor in Paris, and she received greetings from important people from all over the world. Among her far-flung admirers were D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, and even Sigmund Freud. Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé for her, but the Paris authorities banned its production. There was no doubt that Bernhardt was at the pinnacle of her profession, having created 112 different roles during her career.

In 1899, Bernhardt gave up the Renaissance Theatre and acquired a much larger house, the Theatre des Nations, which she renamed the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt. There she first played her famous Hamlet in a French translation of Shakespeare’s play. She soon repeated her performance as Hamlet in London, where she also received great acclaim.

Bernhardt did not limit her acting to the stage, but enthusiastically embraced the new media that were then being invented. During the 1880’s, she made a sound recording of Racine’s Phèdre at the home of the American inventor Thomas Edison. Other recordings followed and then, commencing in 1900, she began to appear in films. In her eight feature films she played some of her most famous stage parts, including Hamlet, Camille, and Queen Elizabeth.

Bernhardt also turned to extensive writing during the twentieth century. In addition to plays and poetry, she published three books: The Idol of Paris (1921), a novel based on her own life; Ma double vie: Mémoires de Sarah Bernhardt (1907; My Double Life , 1907), an autobiography; and L’Art du théâtre: La voix, le geste, la prononciation (1923; The Art of Theatre , 1924), a textbook on acting.

In 1914, Bernhardt was inducted into the French Legion of Honor. The following year she had to have a leg amputated, but that did not prevent her being carried on a litter chair to visit French troops during World War I. Wearing a wooden leg, she continued to act until she died in 1923.

Significance

The greatest woman actor of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt was also a sculptor and painter of some accomplishment. In addition she wrote poetry and plays and published three books. Moreover, she also proved a successful businesswoman by managing several theaters in Paris. Most important of all, she became a symbol not only of what a woman could accomplish, but also of women’s rights to live and practice life with as much freedom as their male counterparts.

Bernhardt was also a good mother, dearly loved by her son, in whose arms she died. She married and divorced and had romantic affairs with both men and women. She wore men’s pants in the face of scandalous reaction, and played both male and female parts on the stage. Her male parts included the bearded role of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597). She was also the first modern performer to play the roles of both Ophelia and Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (pr. c. 1600-1601), and she became famous for playing the latter role both on stage and in film. To enhance her rebellious image, she even had a photograph taken of herself sleeping in a coffin.

Bibliography

Aston, Elaine. Sarah Bernhardt: French Actress on the English Stage. Oxford, England: Berg Publishers, 1989. A thorough treatment of Bernhardt’s many appearances in England and the British reaction to her.

Bernhardt, Sarah. My Double Life. Translated by Victoria Tietze Larson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. New translation of Bernhardt’s own tell-it-all biography, which was first published in 1907. Not all of this book is verifiable fact, but it is useful in understanding Bernhardt as both an artist and a nineteenth century woman.

Brockett, Oscar, and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. 9th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002. This basic general resource on theatrical history offers excellent information on Bernhardt and her impact throughout the world.

Duerr, Edwin. The Length and Depth of Acting. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963. Detailed study of actors from the time of the ancient Greeks through the mid-twentieth century. Good entries on the work and theory of Sarah Bernhardt.

Gold, Arthur, and Robert Fitzdale. The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. A thorough study of the life, times, and contributions of the great actor.