In the 19th and early 20th centuries, everyone worshiped at Sarah Bernhardt’s altar. She was a stage actress at a time when the theater was the equivalent of a stadium, a worldwide celebrity who ushered in the very concept.
Born in Paris in 1844, Bernhardt was a sickly child whose mother preferred to ignore her. As an adult, she insisted on standing out. She captivated theatergoers with her hypnotic voice (Victor Hugo called it “golden”) and her bombastic acting style. No role, no profession, was too ambitious: she was also a writer, painter, sculptor, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist. The newspapers reinforced the legend of the ‘divine Sarah’, as did the various artists and writers who regarded her as their muse.
The fanaticism around her was similar to that inspired by the Beatles or Taylor Swift; her devotees made shrines and gathered under her hotel window; reporters followed her movements like proto-paparazzi.
Bernhardt may have been an object of extraordinary fascination, but nothing about her was passive. Playing for the camera, she generated her public image on her own terms with dynamism and feverish originality. Bernhardt relentlessly created herself — filling her memoirs with tall tales of her origins, living her life on a scale that matched the epics she starred in — as an act of defiance. Only she would define her, and even now, 100 years after her death in 1923, she challenges us to try and pin her down.
This mischievous trait of Bernhardt drew me to a 1910 self-portrait featured in the exhibition “Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the Star,” which runs through August 27 at the Petit Palais in Paris. It is an oil painting of the actress as a clown smiling slyly. Bernhardt next played another clown in Jean Richepin’s 1883 play “Pierrot the Murderer”—a famous photograph of the actress in her Pierrot outfit is featured in the exhibit—but the self-portrait seemed to me a statement of purpose.
In the 19th century, the clown was something like a poet, who walked the line between reality and fiction and invented an alternative to the status quo. It is no wonder that Bernhardt saw himself in such a figure. On and off stage, her showmanship pitted her against the average woman bound by the restrictions of France’s Third Republic.
Bernhardt blinded herself because she was free. “She did what she wanted and didn’t care what others thought,” said Annick Lemoine, the director of the Petit Palais and one of the Bernhardt exhibition’s co-curators. “She loved men and women. She traveled around the world. She had an illegitimate son and raised him the way she wanted. She wasn’t afraid.”
At the age of 18, Bernhardt joined the prestigious company of the Comédie Française theater in Paris, but she would not stay long. An argument broke out between an experienced actress and the feisty newcomer, which led to Bernhardt’s firing – yet another upheaval in the young woman’s already tumultuous life. Her father was out of the picture and her mother, a Parisian courtesan, had transported her daughter all over France – to a boarding school, a country nursery, a nunnery.
Bernhardt, it seems, got used to the crowds, and not long after she was kicked out of the Comédie Française, she broke out in a revival of Alexandre Dumas’s “Kean” in 1868. From ingénue to full-fledged luminary, she grabbed bold roles like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Hamlet – characters she inhabited, like a wild spirit, rather than just playing. She took her greatest hits on tour and performed for audiences all over Europe and the United States.
Known for her exaggerated death scenes, Bernhardt had a flair for melodrama, and in her private life she was also eccentric with a penchant for the macabre. One of her many hats was decorated with a stuffed bat and she had a picture taken of herself in a coffin pretending to be dead.
These are some of the more than 100 objects from private collections and public institutions around the world on display at the Petit Palais, along with works of art by and about Bernhardt, her stage costumes, personal effects, advertising campaigns, photographs, silent film excerpts and gramophone records. recordings of her voice. (Of course, she was one of the first to use the era’s new technologies for self-promotion.)
Bernhardt’s greatest roles resembled David Bowie personas. For example, she brought the Empress Théodora or the doomed singer Floria Tosca not so much to life as to her own. Walking through a room in the exhibit dedicated to her theater characters is like coming across the bat cave where she stores the suits and props for her alter egos. In the second half of her career, bored with the tragic female roles that were her fame, she played teens and men—and some teenage boys—as a woman well into her middle age.
“Bernhardt was someone who claimed the right to be extraordinary,” American playwright Theresa Rebeck said in a video interview. Rebeck’s play ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’, which premiered on Broadway in 2018, looks at the backstage drama surrounding the actress’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s drama. Paradoxically, when Hamlet, a neurotic depressive in most productions, received the Bernhardt treatment in 1899, the character seemed steelier and overtly more masculine than usual, which irked traditional critics and teased odd ideas about the mutable nature of identity. “People think I completely rethought the history of that staging for the play,” Rebeck added, “but I really didn’t change that much.”
Rebeck said she was inspired to write about Bernhardt after a visit to Prague’s Alphonse Mucha Museum, home to the actress’ towering posters that have become synonymous with Art Nouveau’s curvilinear designs. In 1894, Bernhardt had commissioned illustrations from a studio to promote her latest play, “Gismonda,” but the first round of mock-ups was not up to snuff. She demanded new versions, stat, which gave the unknown Mucha, one of the company’s underage employees, his big break.
Mucha went on to design several more posters for Bernhardt’s shows; these lofty works, which depict her as a pagan icon, are also on display in the Petit Palais. Dozens of other artists have rendered her image: she is angelic against a gold background in a painting by Jules Masson; a reluctant mistress in a full-body-length portrait by Georges Clairin. In one sketch she is a topless geisha, in another a cartoonish chimera.
Bernhardt, a pioneering self-burner, would certainly have sensed the power of social media. But unlike today’s influencers, many seemingly determined to conjure up an illusion of authenticity, she refused to be anything but larger than life. That’s why, like Keanu Reeves or Nicolas Cage, she always played an elevated version of herself. The tension between her irrepressible individuality and dramatic skill yielded something rare: fame.
Sarah Bernhardt: And woman created the star
Until August 27 at the Petit Palais in Paris; petitpalias.fr.