Sarah Bernhardt was the most famous actor of her age. I'd say "actress," but she played so many male parts that gender seems beside the point. And I'd avoid the double meaning of the word "age" except that Bernhardt did, after all, become the world's first international movie star at 68. She doddered onto the screen as a young Queen Elizabeth, and then doddered off again to have her usual affair with her young leading man—or at least, she allowed everyone to think that she did. In describing the "divine Sarah," it's always safer to suggest possibilities rather than declare certainties. That's because Bernhardt was, according to her most recent biographer, Robert Gottlieb, a "relentless fabulist" who never settled for "anything less than the best story." Gottlieb quotes Alexandre Dumas (fils) in reference to her famous thinness: "You know, she's such a liar, she may even be fat."

Here are the (mostly) undisputed facts of Bernhardt's early life, according to Gottlieb. Born in Paris in 1844 (or was it 1843?), the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan and a mysterious father, Sarah was raised away from her family, first with peasants in Breton and then in a convent school (Youle Bernhardt had all three of her illegitimate daughters baptized). Forever feeling unwanted and abandoned, Sarah showed an early knack for dramatic scenes, once throwing herself from a window to chase after her mother's departing carriage (or it may have been her aunt's carriage, and there may have been no window), another time causing a family crisis by insisting that she was going to become a nun and marry only the Bon Dieu. Her mother wouldn't have it—"You know that, after your sister, I love you better than anyone in the world."

In between those mini-melodramas came other scenes lifted from her future repertoire as the queen of tragedy. There were tears and soliloquies, declarations of despair and threats of suicide, all delivered in that beautiful, silvery voice. Even Youle must have seen something promising in her tempestuous, artistic daughter—frustrated pride is the best explanation for her outrage when Sarah did try at anything and failed ("And to think that this is a child of mine! … The whole world calls you stupid, and the whole world knows that you're my child!").

According to Gottlieb, it's likely that Sarah would have eventually taken up her mother's trade. Youle pushed all her daughters in that direction; Jeanne and Regine both drifted into prostitution and drug addiction (and both died early and tragically). Sarah was beautiful, she liked men, and she wasn't above doing "favors" when she or the family needed money. Fashionable Paris had long tolerated female promiscuity; Sarah's son Maurice (the joy of her life, born when she was twenty) may have come from a liaison with a Belgian prince, and throughout her life she carried on romantic relationships with the index of a Modern European History textbook—Gustave Dore, the Prince of Wales, Victor Hugo, Napoleon III. But what saved her from her sisters' fate was a word early on from her mother's lover, the duc de Morny. Having been present for some of Sarah's drawing-room tempests, he arranged for her to attend the Conservatoire, where she could be trained as an actress for the Comedie-Francaise.

Bernhardt worked hard, even obsessively, in her early days as an actress, and she made friends (especially male friends—lots of them), but it was years before she proved her exceptional talent. Part of the problem lay in her unorthodox style; from the beginning, Bernhardt rebelled against the theatrical conventions of the period. Acting in the mid-19th century was highly stylized; predictable gestures, costumes, and manners allowed the audience to know what a character was like, apart from speech or natural emotion. Sarah's gifts, says Gottlieb, lay in her voice, her natural sense of poetry, and—what could be fully expressed only in the melodramas for which she later became famous— "an irrepressible emotional dynamism." As the consumptive Camille or the incestuous Phedre, she would bring to the stage "an ecstasy of self-annihilation, extreme emotion projected through the highest levels of craft."

But it was difficult for an actress like Bernhardt—who could really shine only when at the center of attention—to fight her way downstage. She herself credited her meeting with Victor Hugo as a crucial turning point in her career; he became her "poet," she said, and put the "crown of the Elect" on her head. Yet by the time she first performed Hugo's Ruy Blas, Bernhardt had already left the Comedie-Francaise for the more relaxed Odeon; she had single-handedly organized that theater as a hospital during the Franco-Prussian War; and she had used her wartime influence to turn herself into a rallying point for French patriotism. In short, she had discovered how to grasp and hold the attention of the public beyond the theater. Before her first American tour in 1880 (there were to be eight more, plus trips to Australia, South America, and even Africa), Henry James called her an advertising genius, "too American not to succeed in America."

The question for every Bernhardt biographer is whether she really was an extraordinarily gifted artist or just a phenomenon of the burgeoning media age. Was she truly the actress that Mark Twain put in a class above "great," that D.H. Lawrence described as a "wild creature, a gazelle with a beautiful panther's fascination and fury … fascinating to an extraordinary degree"? Or was she just "Sarah Barnum," a glorified showgirl who held the public's attention with wild stunts—traveling with a menagerie of zoo animals (including an alligator, Ali Gaga), enjoying an airborne picnic in an untethered balloon, wearing hats decorated with stuffed bats. Etc.

One way to answer that question is to measure how well she succeeded according to the standards she set for herself. Gottlieb quotes a passage in which she gives her thoughts on acting, sounding, as he says, like "a Method actor avant la lettre": "I contend that it is necessary to feel all the sentiments that agitate the soul of the character it is desired to represent …. [W]e must make our characters live. And in no way can we do this better than by quitting our own personality to enter that of another being." Gottlieb then asks the obvious question: "Did she really believe that on stage she subordinated herself to the character she was playing? … [D]id she really not understand the immense power of her own personality?" He answers that, even if she didn't, others certainly did; Lytton Strachey, for instance. "During her best years," Strachey wrote, "her personality remained an artistic instrument; but eventually it became too much for her … the artist became submerged in the divinity."

The pursuit of emotional truth—like the exotic animals she lugged on train journeys throughout the Americas—demanded enormous energy and ultimately proved unmanageable. The feelings that Sarah brought to the stage were real enough, but they came from the menagerie of characters that populated her own psyche: abandoned daughters, guilty mothers, desperate lovers—parts of herself that felt unbearably wild. If the craft of acting is the hard-won skill of becoming consciously unselfconscious—learning to let go of all inhibition in order to bring a story alive for a willing audience—then Bernhardt did succeed, but only for a time. Eventually, her tigers stayed in the cage.

When you watch silent clips of Sarah Bernhardt today (easy to find on YouTube), what strikes you are the eye-rolling, the trembling, the sweeping gestures. To our eyes, so accustomed to close-up photography and minimalist film acting, her performances look too choreographed to be authentic. Audiences in Bernhardt's early years found her emotional freedom revolutionary, but by the end of her career, when the theater itself had abandoned epics in favor of psychological naturalism and moving pictures were shrinking the space between actor and audience, critics lambasted Sarah Bernhardt for being artificial and old-fashioned. And she was truly getting old—never a good career move for an actress. Suffering terrible leg pain in her sixties (possibly a result of jumping out of that window as a child), she had the offending limb amputated above the knee. It was a typical Sarah decision, full of bravery and pathos; afterward, she laughed off the inconvenience, continuing to tour, performing scenes from her great shows well into her seventies, propped up in a chair or on one of her many deathbeds.

There's something very French about Sarah Bernhardt's story: the child raised among prostitutes, who, instead of growing into an ordinary adult, becomes an artist, a grown child playing at art. Edith Piaf spent her childhood in a brothel, and she never overcame her early waifishness. There was always a quivering innocence to her voice, as if the needy urchin appeared again whenever she stood on a stage. But Piaf was vulnerable offstage, too, whereas Bernhardt found a way out of the pain of a vicious childhood. For a very little while, as Robert Gottlieb shows in this fine, sympathetic biography, she put the world on a leash and added it to her own private menagerie.

Betty Smartt Carter writes fiction and essays teaches Latin in Alabama.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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