Well, I know what book I’m going to read next.
Sarah Bernhardt strolls through many of the biographies I read of that period, making cameo appearances in her crazy outfits, causing jealousy, envy and awe in everyone she met, especially those in the acting profession who were trying to follow in her footsteps. She was the most famous actress in the world for a good chunk of her life. She reduced audiences to a quivering pulp. She was eccentric. She could be generous, she could be petty. But I don’t know that much about her. The book reviewed sounds fantastic, and I can’t wait to read it.
From the review:
Despite “endless testimony about Sarah’s acting,” the “peculiar magic” of Sarah Bernhardt, as Brandon puts it, is extremely hard to recapture. The scratchy recordings and the jerky films only emphasize the remoteness of the past. (Bernhardt was horrified to see herself on film: she is said to have fainted at the sight of her aged self in La Dame aux camélias.) What strikes one about the recorded Bernhardt is precisely what she is supposed to have abolished: the well-rehearsed gestures, the grand, domineering stiltedness. Her breathless recital of Phaedra’s famous speech from Act Two of Racine’s Phèdre is more pedagogically than theatrically impressive: in her cavernous soprano voice, with a dying plunge in every line, she makes all the obligatory liaisons, enunciates the correct number of syllables, draws out the vowels to the precise length required by the emotion.
A student called May Agate who attended one of Bernhardt’s private classes found an instructress in place of an actress:
She never moved from her chair to demonstrate. She would explain, lecture to us…. What appealed to me in her teaching was the extraordinary application of common sense to the interpretation of every line, so that it never ceased to be a human being speaking.
The problem is, do we know how “a human being” spoke a hundred years ago? Even a perfect recording could not restore the familiar backdrop of the time, the contrastingly normal voices in the foyer, the daily pantomime of gestures and expressions, nor, of course, the theatergoers’ notion of what constituted a “natural” performance.
A plausible ghost of the great actress can be conjured up from reviews and from her own and other people’s memoirs: “her talent for endowing immobility with excitement,” her thrilling silences, the gestures that began at the shoulder and made full use of her long arms, her “face-acting” and her clever use of cosmetics, and above all, perhaps, the sheer stamina that enabled her, for instance, to simulate blindness by showing only the whites of her eyes for half an hour. Some of her startling appeal seems to have come from partially corrected faults: she had a tendency to speak with clenched teeth and had been advised at the Conservatoire to place little rubber balls in her mouth; she sometimes rushed through certain passages, mumbling and chanting them in a monotone, then suddenly rasping out the crucial word or phrase.
Gerda Taranow, whose excellent Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend is practically a Sarah Bernhardt acting manual, describes her technique as a form of method acting learned at the popular boulevard theaters, combined with a secure foundation in the curriculum of the Conservatoire. It was because of this classical grounding that she was able to break the rules so effectively, speaking with her back to the audience or emphasizing the erotic potential of a role. Everyone knew that Phèdre was a drama of sexual obsession, but only Bernhardt made the sexuality explicit, says Brandon, “to the point of, at one moment, drawing her hands up the insides of her thighs.” Perhaps this was the fruit of those “somewhat questionable entertainments” of her youth. It was a far cry from the “dreary classicality…calculated to freeze the marrow” that Charles Dickens had witnessed at the Comédie-Française in 1856, a few years before Bernhardt entered the Conservatoire.
Acting styles through the centuries are a passion of mine, and it is wonderful to hear someone actually attempt to take on what it is that she was doing, even if we have to squint into the past to try to figure out why it was so damn effective.
Richard Gordon shares an amazing anecdote about Bernhardt in his 1997 book An Alarming History of Famous and Difficult Patients:
In 1915, during an unfortunate performance in the title role of Victorien Sardou’s drama La Tosca, Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) injured her right leg so badly that it had to be amputated. While she was recovering, the manager of the Pan-American Exposition (in San Francisco) asked for permission to exhibit her leg, offering $100,000 for the privilege. Bernhardt cabled this reply: “Which leg?”
She hummed the “Marseillaise” as she was wheeled down the hospital corridor and afterwards used a wheelchair, disdaining prostheses and crutches – bearers instead carried the divine Sarah around in a specially designed litter chair in Louis XV style with gilt carving, like a Byzantine princess. Immediately upon leaving the hospital, she filmed Jeanne Dore (1915), again directed by Louis Mercanton. She was shot either standing or sitting; this in fact pinned her down and forced her to use facial expression rather than movement and helped her performance. The five-reel film, distributed by Universal in the U.S., got rave reviews and reflected well upon both its game star and the industry as an art form. For ovations she stood on one leg, held on to a piece of furniture, and gestured with one arm.
Shortly after the amputation, she visited the WWI front lines near Verdun to perform for French troops in mess tents, hospital wards, open market places and ramshackle barns. Propped in a shabby armchair, she recited a patriotic piece to war-dazed men fresh from the trenches. When she ended with a rousing “Aux armes!” they rose cheering and sobbing. “The way she ignored her handicap was beautiful,” wrote an actress who accompanied her. “A victory of the spirit over the failing flesh.”
Her final tour through America lasted from 1916 to 1918 and then she returned home to France. Bernhardt continued to practice her craft until her death in 1923. She was made a member of France’s Legion of Honour in 1914.
I did not know much about her early life, and it sounds rather harrowing. I am very much looking forward to reading this new book.
I have a picture of Sarah Bernhardt on my wall (if you scroll down this post, you can get a glimpse of it on my wall), found for me by my father in a battered cardboard envelope at the library in a pile of archived material. He gave it to me. It is beautiful, a silvery sketch, Bernhardt in profile. A star of a time gone by.
Sheila,
The fascinating thing about Bernhardt is we (I) may never know. Reading some of those wild hyperbolic descriptions of her acting abilities, styles, tricks, whatever, brought to mind the silent screen star style of acting – but by several magnitudes more emotive. On the other hand the hyperbole may have been more a means to get across, not the acting itself, but the effect of a performance on the viewer – an effect that cannot be adequately described by mere words. At any rate, am look forward to a review of the book on Sarah.