A courtesan’s daughter in the Latin Quarter
Sarah Bernhardt was born Henriette-Rosine Bernard in October 1844 in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Her mother, Judith (Julie) Bernard, was a Dutch-born Jewish woman who became one of the most successful courtesans of the Second Empire, counting politicians, bankers and writers among her patrons. Her father’s identity has never been established with certainty; Bernhardt herself wrote that he came from a family in Le Havre that paid for her education. Her mother travelled constantly and saw little of her, leaving her first with a nurse in Brittany and then in boarding schools.
At about ten, with the sponsorship of the Duc de Morny, half-brother of Emperor Napoleon III and one of her mother’s patrons, she was sent to the Grandchamp convent school near Versailles. There she was baptised and received her first communion as a Roman Catholic, and for a time she wanted to become a nun. She was a passionate, wilful, sickly girl with a mass of frizzy hair and a thin figure that would be mocked for years.
The making of an actress
When she was a teenager a family council, including Morny, decided that she should go on the stage. The idea horrified her: she had never seen a play. Morny took her to the Comédie-Française with her mother and the novelist Alexandre Dumas père, and she wept so loudly at Racine’s Britannicus that she disturbed the audience. Dumas comforted her and told Morny she was destined for the theatre. With Morny’s influence she auditioned for the Paris Conservatoire, reciting La Fontaine’s fable of the two pigeons when she had no one to give her cues for Racine, and won a place.
She studied there from 1860 to 1862, changed her name from Bernard to Bernhardt, and in August 1862 made her debut at the Comédie-Française in the title role of Racine’s Iphigénie. It was not a success, and within months she was dismissed after slapping a senior actress who had shoved her younger sister. She went to the popular Gymnase theatre, travelled, and in December 1864, aged twenty, gave birth to her only child, Maurice; his father is generally believed to have been the Belgian aristocrat Henri, Prince de Ligne. She raised him alone and adored him all her life.
The golden voice
Her breakthrough came at the Odéon theatre, where she was engaged in 1866. In 1868 she won ovations in a revival of Dumas’s Kean and as the boy troubadour Zanetto in François Coppée’s Le Passant, the first of many male roles. In 1872 she played the Queen of Spain in Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, and the old poet knelt to kiss her hand; at a dinner after the hundredth performance he toasted her golden voice. When war came in 1870 and Paris was besieged by the Prussians, she turned the Odéon into a military hospital, organised supplies and nursed the wounded herself, caring for more than 150 soldiers.
She returned to the Comédie-Française in 1872 and became the greatest tragic actress in France. Her Phèdre in Racine’s tragedy, played opposite Jean Mounet-Sully, became her most famous classical role. The critic Francisque Sarcey wrote that she played with her heart and her entrails. In 1877 she triumphed as Doña Sol in Hugo’s Hernani; Hugo sent her a diamond in the shape of a tear with a note saying she had made him weep.
The first global star
In 1879 the Comédie-Française took her to London, where she held audiences spellbound in Phèdre even though most could not follow Racine’s French. A year later she broke her contract, paid heavy damages, and set out on her own. With the impresario Edward Jarrett she formed her own company and in October 1880 sailed for America. Her first tour covered 157 performances in 51 cities, from Montreal to New Orleans, travelling by private train; her La Dame aux camélias, renamed Camille for American audiences, made audiences weep in town after town. She was denounced from pulpits for her private life, which only sold more tickets.
Over the following decades she toured Europe from London to Russia, South America, Australia and the United States again and again; the Encyclopaedia Judaica counts nine American visits. Wherever she went, people who understood no French came to hear her voice and watch her gestures. She played La Dame aux camélias more than a thousand times. Victorien Sardou wrote Fédora, Théodora and La Tosca for her; La Tosca later inspired Puccini’s opera. In an age before film and radio she became the first performer whose fame was truly global, a celebrity in the modern sense, managing her own image through photographs, interviews and spectacle.
Actress-manager, Hamlet and Mucha
Bernhardt was also a formidable businesswoman and director. From 1893 she ran the Théâtre de la Renaissance, managing everything from finance to lighting and costumes. She banned the hired applauders known as the claque, required women to remove their hats so others could see, and abolished the prompter’s box, insisting actors know their lines. In 1894 she commissioned a poster for Sardou’s Gismonda from an almost unknown Czech artist, Alphonse Mucha. She was so delighted that she gave him a contract for more, and his posters for her helped create the Art Nouveau style that swept Europe.
In 1899 she took a 25-year lease on the large Théâtre des Nations on the Place du Châtelet and renamed it the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. There, at 54, she played Hamlet in a new prose translation, and in 1900 the young Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon’s son, in Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon. She was a serious sculptor and painter too, exhibiting at the Paris Salon, where her sculpture After the Storm received an honourable mention in 1876; it is now in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. She was among the first great actors to make sound recordings and to appear in films, and the success of the 1912 film of her Queen Elizabeth helped the producer Adolph Zukor found the Famous Players company, forerunner of Paramount Pictures.
Jewish heritage and the Dreyfus affair
Bernhardt was raised and baptised a Catholic, attended Mass when in Paris and received the last rites before she died. But she never denied or forgot her Jewish origins. Her Jewish grandmother, described as strictly observant, helped care for the young Maurice. Asked once by a reporter whether she was a Christian, she answered that she was a Roman Catholic and a member of the great Jewish race, and that she was waiting until Christians became better. Others did not let her forget them either: on her tour of Russia in the early 1880s, amid a wave of pogroms, antisemitic crowds in Kiev and Odessa threw stones at her.
When the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason, the case split France in two. Bernhardt became one of his outspoken defenders, alongside Émile Zola. A conservative newspaper ran the headline that Sarah Bernhardt had joined the Jews against the army, and her own son Maurice, who sided with the anti-Dreyfusards, refused to speak to her for a year. She did not back down. Decades after her death, when the Germans occupied Paris in the Second World War, they removed her name from her theatre because of her Jewish ancestry.
Courage, on one leg
Bernhardt’s private life was as theatrical as her stage career. She kept a menagerie that at times included dogs, a cheetah, a monkey and a lion cub; she was photographed in the satin-lined coffin she kept in her bedroom; she had many lovers, and a brief, unhappy marriage in 1882 to the Greek actor Jacques Damala. She spent lavishly, often fell deep into debt, and repeatedly saved herself by touring. Her motto, quand même, roughly ‘even so’ or ‘nevertheless’, suited her.
An old knee injury worsened over the years, and in February 1915, aged seventy, she had her right leg amputated. She refused an artificial leg and had herself carried in a chair. Within months she was back on stage, playing roles that let her sit. During the First World War she travelled to the front, including near Verdun, and performed for soldiers propped in an armchair, reciting patriotic verse. After making two patriotic short films in 1916, and despite the danger of German submarines, she crossed the Atlantic for a final American tour, landing back in France on 11 November 1918, the day the armistice was signed. France had made her a member of the Legion of Honour in 1914.
Death and legacy
Sarah Bernhardt was still working when she collapsed in March 1923, while a film was being shot in her own home because she was too weak to travel. She died in Paris on 26 March 1923, aged 78. Tens of thousands of people followed her coffin through the streets to Père Lachaise Cemetery, pausing in silence outside her theatre. Her tombstone bears a single word: Bernhardt. Her unfinished book on acting, The Art of the Theatre, was published after her death.
She changed what an actress could be. She was a star who chose her own plays, ran her own company and theatre, negotiated her own contracts and earned a fortune on her own terms in an era when women had few legal rights. She took her art across oceans to audiences who had never seen French theatre, and she helped launch the poster art of Mucha and the business of feature films. Her theatre on the Place du Châtelet, renamed under the occupation, carried her name again after the war and today, as the Théâtre de la Ville, still stands. The illegitimate daughter of a Dutch-Jewish courtesan became, quite simply, the most famous actress in the world.
Sources & further reading
Sarah Bernhardt, Wikipedia · Bernhardt, Sarah, Encyclopaedia Judaica via Jewish Virtual Library · Sarah Bernhardt, Wikiquote · Sarah Bernhardt, Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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