Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
The Drama of Sarah Bernhardt
By Robert Gottlieb
Sarah Bernhardt
by Henry Gidel
Paris: Flammarion, 401 pp., €23.00
Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama
by Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver
catalog of the 2006 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York City
Jewish Museum/Yale University Press, 216 pp., $50.00
Sarah Bernhardt's First American Theatrical Tour, 1880–1881
by Patricia Marks
McFarland, 212 pp. (2003)
My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt
translated from the French by Victoria Tietze Larson
SUNY Press, 345 pp. (1999)
Being Divine: A Biography of Sarah Bernhardt
by Ruth Brandon
London: Secker and Warburg, 466 pp. (1991)
The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt
by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale
Knopf, 353 pp. (1991)
Dear Sarah Bernhardt
by Françoise Sagan, translated from the French by Sabine Destrée
Seaver, 232 pp. (1988)
Sarah Bernhardt
by Philippe Jullian
Paris: Balland, 271 pp. (1977)
Sarah Bernhardt and Her World
by Joanna Richardson
Putnam, 232 pp. (1977)
Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend
by Gerda Taranow
Princeton University Press, 287 pp. (1972)
Madame Sarah
by Cornelia Otis Skinner
Houghton Mifflin, 356 pp. (1967)
The Idol of Paris
by Sarah Bernhardt
Macaulay, 320 pp. (1922)
Les Mémoires de Sarah Barnum
by Marie Colombier, with a preface by Paul Bonnetain
Paris, 332 pp. (1883)
Sarah Bernhardt won't go away. She was born in 1844 and died in 1923, long past her glory days and well out of our reach. Her few silent films are awkward and off-putting. Yet she remains the most famous actress the world has ever known. Books about her, films, plays, dance works, documentaries, exhibitions, merchandise—they keep on coming. Only last year, a big new biography was published in France—respectable, but essentially going over the same old ground. Also last year, the Jewish Museum in New York staged an exemplary Bernhardt exhibition, which demonstrated, among other things, why Bernhardt was the priestess of Art Nouveau, with her elaborately rich costumes, her splendid ornaments of gem-studded precious metals, and—obvious in the portraits, the photographs, the caricatures—the way she almost always stood and sat: in a pure Art Nouveau spiral.
Review, 4888 words
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