Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt is the most famous actress of the late nineteenth century stage. Celebrated by an emerging and very vocal group of young female workers and artisans in her native Paris in the late 1860s and the 1870s called "les saradoteurs she went on to become the most popular actress of her generation in Europe, North America, and Australia. Attention has been paid to her "golden voice," the clever ways she marketed and promoted herself, her pioneering patronage of artists such as Alphonse Mucha and René Lalique and her capacity to be at once a successful actress, manager, and theatre director. Scant attention has been paid, however, to Bernhardt’s involvement and success in the early motion picture film industry, both in France and abroad.

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt (born Sara-Marie-Henriette Bernard, 1844-1923) is the most famous French actress of the late nineteenth century. Celebrated for her golden voice and for the sinuous flow of her slender figure on stage, she was also a theatre manager, author, sculptor, painter, and a clever businesswoman. She developed and nurtured global fame in an era when the popular press facilitated international renown. Print media as well as the emerging phonograph and film industries enabled Bernhardt to cultivate and develop her celebrity into the early twentieth century, appealing to new publics and audiences. During the First World War she became a French porte-parole for the Allied cause, appearing on stage and in a propaganda film, as well as in demonstrations and events in support of Allied troops across France and America. When Bernhardt died in 1923 at the age of 78, millions crowded the streets to watch her funeral cortège pass through Paris. This essay explores her achievements in her lifetime.

Celebrating transgressive celebrity : Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt (born Sara-Marie-Henriette Bernard, 1844-1923) was the most famous actress of the late nineteenth century. Celebrated for her golden voice, for her use of the spiral as the building block for movement on the theatrical stage, for an innovative use of costume and jewellery, for her patronage emerging artists, and for the business acumen that saw her fast become a household name across the globe, she was the progenitor of celebrity as we know it today. This article explores the ways in which her achievements can be considered 'dangerous' today.