What happened to sarah bernhardt
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Sarah Bernhardt
French stage actress (1844–1923)
This article is about the French stage actress. For the American comedienne/actress, see Sandra Bernhard. For the episode of an adventure series, see Sarah Bernhardt (Lucky Luke).
Sarah Bernhardt (French:[saʁabɛʁnɑʁt];[note 1] 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 is also linked with the success of artist Alphonse Mucha, whose work she helped to publicize. Mucha became one of
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This celebrated star of the French stage had a sporadic love-hate affair with early cinema. After her film debut in Hamlet, Duel Scene with Laertes (1900) she declared she detested the medium; yet she consented to appear in another film, La Tosca (1909). Upon seeing the results, she reportedly recoiled in horror, demanding that the negative be destroyed. Her next film appearance, in the Film d'Art production of La dame aux camélias (1912), was a critical and popular success, helping give cinema artistic dignity. The following year she made Les amours de la reine Élisabeth (1912) in Britain. The receipts from this film's distribution in the US provided Adolph Zukor with the funds to found Paramount. Bernhardt, at 69, was offered a fortune to make films with other companies, but stayed with Film d'Art, appearing in Adrienne Lecouvreur (1913). She appeared in two more pictures after losing a leg in 1915, Jeanne Doré (1915) and Mothers of France (1917), both produced as WWI morale boosters. In 1923, when she was 79, her hotel room was turned into a studio so that she
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Sarah Bernhardt
by Victoria Duckett
Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre programme, 1900. Private Collection.
Sarah Bernhardt is the most famous actress of the late nineteenth century stage. Celebrated by an emerging and very vocal group of young female workers and artisans in her native Paris in the late 1860s and the 1870s called “les saradoteurs” (Rueff 1951, 48-49; Bernhardt 1923, 290), she went on to become the most popular actress of her generation in Europe, North America, and Australia. Attention has been paid to her “golden voice,” the clever ways she marketed and promoted herself, her pioneering patronage of artists such as Alphonse Mucha and René Lalique, and her capacity to be at once a successful actress, manager, and theatre director (Pronier 1942, 93; Musser 2013, 154-174; Stokes 1988, 16-30). Scant attention has been paid, however, to Bernhardt’s involvement and success in the early motion picture film industry, both in France and abroad. This is surprising. Indeed, she was among the first celebrities to engage with the motion picture, playing Hamlet in a one-minute film
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