Background and career
Sarah Bernhardt (French: [saʁa bɛʁnɑʁt]; born Henriette-Rosine Bernard; 22 October 1844 – 26 March 1923) was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She played female and male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours worldwide and was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and act in motion pictures. She was also an accomplished visual artist, as a painter and particularly as a sculptor.
At the height of her world fame, Bernhardt commissioned the first lithographic theater poster created by the then-unknown artist Alphonse Mucha for the play she was starring in and directing: Gismonda. Bernhardt was delighted with the result, gave him a contract for six more posters, and Mucha became one of the more sought-after artists of this period for his Art Nouveau style.
Henriette-Rosine Bernard was born at 5 rue de L'École-de-Médecine in the Latin Quarter of Paris on 22 October 1844. She was the daughter of Judith Bernard (also known as Julie and in France as Youle), a Dutch Jewish courtesan. The name of her father was not recorded for a long time, but he is known now to have been an attorney in Le Havre. Bernhardt later wrote that her father's family paid for her education, insisted she be baptized as a Catholic, and left a large sum to be paid when she came of age. Her mother traveled frequently, and saw little of her daughter. She placed Bernhardt with a nurse in Brittany, then in a cottage in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
When Bernhardt was seven, her mother sent her to a boarding school for young ladies in the Paris suburb of Auteuil, paid with funds from her father's family. There, she acted in her first theatrical performance in the play Clothilde, where she held the Queen of the Fairies role and performed her first of many dramatic death scenes. While in the boarding school, her mother rose to the top of Parisian courtesans, consorting with politicians, bankers, generals, and writers. Her patrons and friends included Charles de Morny, Duke of Morny, the half-brother of Emperor Napoleon III and President of the French legislature.
How Sarah Bernhardt makes money
Doucet recommended her to Edouard Thierry, the chief administrator of the Théâtre Français, who offered Bernhardt a place as a pensionnaire at the theater, at a minimum salary. Her salary was immediately raised to 250 francs a month.
