Titans of History

SARAH BERNHARDT

1844–1923

There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses—and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.

Mark Twain

Born in Paris, the actress famed across the world as the Divine Sarah was as tempestuous in life as she was on stage. With boundless resilience—possibly a result of her insecure childhood as the illegitimate child of a Dutch courtesan—she was first a successful actress in France, before storming the London stage in 1876. Even the loss of her leg in later life posed no major obstacle to her flamboyant acting. And as soon as she had recovered from the amputation, she made a morale-boosting tour of the First World War front, conveyed about in a litter chair. She entertained no thoughts of retirement but just made sure that henceforth her parts could be played sitting down.

Convent-educated but in fact Jewish, as a young girl Bernhardt toyed with the idea of becoming a nun. But her mother’s influential lover, Charles, Duc de Morny (1811–65), apparently decided otherwise. A brilliant French statesman, now undeservedly forgotten, he was the son of Queen Hortense of Holland and Emperor Napoleon III’s half-brother, as well as a natural grandson of Prince Talleyrand. A financier, racehorse owner and aesthete, not to mention an enthusiastic lover, he married a Russian princess. He was the mastermind of Napoleon III’s coup and regime, and president of the Corps Legislatif, but his early death helped doom the Second Empire. It was entirely appropriate that this personification of French power, worldliness and style should have launched (and possibly fathered) the most famous French actress until the era of film.

Morny secured Bernhardt a place at the Paris Conservatoire and a job at the Comédie Française, where she made her debut in 1862, having already won student prizes. Gripped by stage fright, Bernhardt might have seemed better qualified as courtesan than actress. After six years of hard slog, she made her breakthrough and was acclaimed for her roles as Cordelia in a French translation of King Lear and the minstrel Zanetto in Le Passant, a verse play by François Coppée. Her success in the latter was such that she was commanded to reprise her performance in the presence of Napoleon III.

Audiences clamored to experience her inimitable stage style, suffused with stormy outbursts of wild emotion, tears and grief. For many it became unimaginable that her most famous roles, Marguerite in Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias and the title roles in Racine’s Phèdre and Scribe’s Adrienne Lecouvreur, could be played by anyone else.

Victor Hugo, in whose tragedies she starred, was entranced by her “golden voice,” while Sigmund Freud marveled that “every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches.” Yet Bernhardt was denounced by priests, not only for the risqué content of the plays she herself produced but also for her many lovers and unabashed sexuality. She lived life on her own terms, claiming to be “one of the great lovers of my time.” Her promiscuity was notorious: “My dear, when one has sat on a rose bush and pricked oneself, one cannot say which thorn was responsible,” was the response of her lover the Prince de Ligne (descendant of the 18th-century grandee and courtier) when Bernhardt revealed that she was pregnant with his child. Other lovers included Hugo and Gustave Doré. Her middle-aged marriage to the young actor Jacques Damala ended when he ran up extensive debts and deserted her to join the French Foreign Legion. Perhaps her beloved son Maurice was the only man who never let her down.

In the early 1880s she left Paris to begin long international tours through Europe and America, where she not only took the leading female roles in productions of both the classics and modern French plays, but also acted male parts, her slight build making her convincing as Hamlet, for example. A brilliant self-promoter, she conquered Paris, then the world, and was “too American not to succeed in America,” as the writer Henry James wryly commented. Bernhardt was the first international star of the pre-cinematic age—and did star in several early silent movies, among them Queen Elizabeth and La Dame aux camélias, from 1912.

The multi-talented Bernhardt was also a gifted writer and sculptor, a skillful editor and translator of many plays. She herself became an actor-manager, organizing her own profitable tours. When her histrionic style went out of fashion, she simply directed her own theater company, renting the Théâtre des Nations in 1898 (later renamed the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt).

Bernhardt mythologized everything, constantly changing the story of her paternity, and she was probably the healthiest “consumptive” ever to have lived (on at least one occasion, coughing “blood” that was actually red liquid from a concealed bladder). But she was unremittingly loyal. Hearing that her runaway husband was now living in drug-addicted squalor, she personally rescued him, paying for private nursing. She was a fervent French patriot and mesmerized audiences to the very end.