(My Double Life is the autobiography of the French actress...)
My Double Life is the autobiography of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was internationally famed during her lifetime and afterwards as one of the classical theater's all-time greatest stars. Bernhardt's memoirs are composed with a novelist's (or actress's) sense of artistry and suspense that leaves no doubt of the charisma for which she was famed in her "double life" both on-and off-stage. Yet at the same time as this book very consciously contributes to the crafting of her image, it also illuminates a whole era: not only the world of theater, but also the worlds of women, politics, society, Europe and America, and, indeed, of history making itself.
Sarah Bernhardt was the greatest French actress of the later 19th century and one of the best-known figures in the history of the stage.
Background
Born Sarah Henriette Rosine Bernard in Paris on October 23, 1844, she was the illegitimate daughter of Judith van Hard, who came from a Dutch Jewish family, and Edouard Bernard, French student of law. As the child’s presence interfered with her mother’s way of life, she was placed in a convent and baptized, but was always conscious and proud of her Jewish origin.
Education
Bernhardt thought of becoming a nun, but one of her mother’s lovers, the half-brother of Napoleon III, felt that she had a vocation as an actress and arranged for her to attend the government-sponsored acting academy. Her teachers were not particularly impressed with her ability and the feeling was largely reciprocated.
In 1851, she was enrolled in Madame Fressard’s school for young ladies. After two years, she was admitted to Notre Dame du Grandchamp, an Augustine convent school near Versailles, by the influence of one of her mother’s patrons, Duc de Morny.
In 1860, she joined the Conservatoire de Musique at declamation in Paris, the government-sponsored acting school. She soon left it as she found its methods obsolete.
Career
Bernhardt began her career at the Comédie-Française in 1862 in the title role of "Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide", but attracted little attention and was dismissed from the company after slapping the face of another actress.
In 1866, she joined the Odéon theater and there achieved her first triumphs, notably in "Coppéc’s Le Passant", her first male part, which received a command performance before Napoleon III.
She organized a military hospital in the theater during the siege of Paris in 1870. Subsequently she appeared in "Buy Bias", by Victor Hugo, who called her “golden-voiced” and “the divine Sarah.”
She returned to the Comédie-Française in 1872 and had further successes, including "Voltaire’s Zaire", "Racine’s Phèdre and Andromaque", and Hugo’s "Hernani".
Her temperament led her to leave the Comédie-Française in 1880, by which time she had become an international star, and she then toured Europe’s capitals, the United States, Australia, and South America. Her greatest successes were in "La dame aux camélias" by André Dumas fils and Edmond Rostand’s "L'aiglon", in which she played Napoleon’s son. The dramatist Victorien Sardou wrote a series of plays especially for her.
In 1905, while playing Sardou’s "Tosca" in Latin America, she jumped off a cliff in the last act and hurt her knee. The injury was neglected and ten years later, the leg had to be amputated. Nevertheless she continued acting in plays specially written for her, often playing her roles while lying on a sofa. For eighteen months, she was carried around the World War I fronts, appearing before the French troops. She made a number of films, the best-known being "Queen Elizabeth" (1912), an exaggerated performance conveying only a slight idea of her powers.
Her last movie, "La voyante", was filmed in her own home in Paris.
She also wrote a novel, "Petite idol", a book on acting, and an autobiography, "Ma double vie" (1907).
Bernhardt attended a convent school, where she received her first communion as a Roman Catholic in 1856, and thereafter she was fervently religious. However, she never forgot her Jewish heritage.
She said: "No, I'm a Roman Catholic, and a member of the great Jewish race. I'm waiting until Christians become better. "
Views
Quotations:
"Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich. "
"We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget. "
"You must have this charm to reach the pinnacle. It is made of everything and of nothing, the striving will, the look, the walk, the proportions of the body, the sound of the voice, the ease of the gestures. It is not at all necessary to be handsome or to be pretty; all that is needful is charm. "
"We must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them. "
"Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third. "
"The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province of woman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman. "
Personality
Bernhardt began painting while she was at the Comédie-Française; since she rarely performed more than twice a week, she wanted a new activity to fill her time. Her paintings were mostly landscapes and seascapes, with many painted at Belle-Île.
In 1865, Bernhardt bought a coffin for herself and used it as a bed as an approach to augment her preparation for tragedies.
At the commencement of Franco-Prussian war she took a role of nurse on behalf of the French and transformed her theatre into a makeshift hospital to serve wounded soldiers.
She was elated in the company of animals. Her pets included dogs, monkeys, wolves, cheetahs, lions and tigers. She even had lion cubs in a cage in her drawing-room.
Quotes from others about the person
"Sarah was wonderful and terrible. Oh, to see her, and to hear her, a wild creature, a gazelle with a beautiful panther's fascination and fury, laughing in musical French, screaming with true panther cry, sobbing and sighing like a deer sobs, wounded to the death. .. She is not pretty, her voice is not sweet, but there is the incarnation of wild emotion that we share with all living things. .. " - D. H. Lawrence
"I cannot say much for the play, but this Sarah, how she played! From the moment I heard her first lines, pronounced in her vibrant and adorable voice, I had the feeling I had known her for years. None of the lines that she spoke could surprise me; I believed immediately everything that she said. The smallest centimeter of this character was alive and enchanted you. And then, there was the manner she had to flatter, to implore, to embrace. Her incredible positions, the manner in which she keeps silent, but each of her limbs and each of her movements play the role for her! Strange creature! It is easy for me to imagine that she has no need to be any different on the street than she is on the stage!" - Sigmund Freud
Connections
In 1863, Sarah had an affair with a Belgian nobleman, Charles-Joseph Eugene Henry Georges Lamoral de Ligne, with whom she had her only child Maurice Bernhardt. She had two grand-daughters from her son.
In 1882, she married a Greece-born actor Aristides Damala in London. Within few years, their marriage became rocky due to Damala’s drug addiction.
Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious career—redefining the very nature of her art—to her amazing (and highly public) romantic life to her indomitable spirit. Well into her seventies, after the amputation of her leg, she was performing under bombardment for soldiers during World War I, as well as crisscrossing America on her ninth American tour. Her family was also a source of curiosity: the mother she adored and who scorned her; her two half-sisters, who died young after lives of dissipation; and most of all, her son, Maurice, whom she worshiped and raised as an aristocrat, in the style appropriate to his presumed father, the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Only once did they quarrel—over the Dreyfus Affair. Maurice was a right-wing snob; Sarah, always proud of her Jewish heritage, was a passionate Dreyfusard and Zolaist. Though the Bernhardt literature is vast, Gottlieb’s Sarah is the first English-language biography to appear in decades. Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory through which an illegitimate—and scandalous—daughter of a courtesan transformed herself into the most famous actress who ever lived, and into a national icon, a symbol of France.
Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt
Draws on unpublished writings and the reminiscences and critical appraisals of friends, admirers, and detractors to present a portrait of the iron-willed and tempestuous actress