Sarah bernhardt biography book
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Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
January 12,
Robert Gottlieb's Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt offers a comprehensive account of the great actress's life and fame, filling in a number of blanks to be encountered in Bernhardt's own memoirs and drawing on other biographies of Bernhardt which, I suspect, are more detailed and lengthy than inom, for one, would have the time or interest to read.
The core attraction in any book about Bernhardt is Bernhardt's extraordinary cultural impact, which extended a good forty+ years worldwide. She was as famous as famous could be, adulated for her spectacular talent as an actress and a draw wherever she went (to the U.S. nine times, all over Europe and beyond). Gottlieb doesn't say this, but the account he offers leads me to think that part of Bernhardt's celebrity had to do with the decline of aristocracy in France and elsewhere and perhaps also the secularization of "public" sentiment gradually detaching itself from the powers of the "churc
The core attraction in any book about Bernhardt is Bernhardt's extraordinary cultural impact, which extended a good forty+ years worldwide. She was as famous as famous could be, adulated for her spectacular talent as an actress and a draw wherever she went (to the U.S. nine times, all over Europe and beyond). Gottlieb doesn't say this, but the account he offers leads me to think that part of Bernhardt's celebrity had to do with the decline of aristocracy in France and elsewhere and perhaps also the secularization of "public" sentiment gradually detaching itself from the powers of the "churc
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"[This] is that rarest of books, a serious biography that reads not only like a novel, but like a big, romantic, sprawling, over-the-top novel. . . .&#;A wonderful book."—Michael Korda, daglig Beast
~Michael Korda, The daglig Beast
"A fascinating look at Bernhardt's mythology and the stagecraft behind it. . . . What Sarah understood--as Gottlieb, a storied editor and publisher, makes clear--was how the heightened teaterpjäs of performance might be extended to her own life."--Vogue
~Vogue
"Mr. Gottlieb's fluid style and lightly worn authority offer a lucid and essential modern guide to the making of celebrity, in an era before the noun existed."--Norman Lebrecht, Wall Street Journal
~Norman Lebrecht, Wall Street Journal
"Robert Gottlieb is true to the mystery of his subject's self-invented life. He also does what few biographers of famous women seem able or willing to do: He focuses on her work. . . . Vintage Gottleib, full of humor and r•
My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt
September 15,These memoirs which I read in its original French version, lucky me! could have been entitled:
"It is worth entering life seriously, but cheerfully."
But Sarah Bernhardt, French actress (), who liked this maxim by Mr. Auber, her director at the Conservatoire, decided otherwise because that is precisely what characterized her: to decide otherwise, to follow her own path; not to go against others, not to run over others, but only to live life to the full and in her own way. Maybe because her fragile health made her think that her life would be short, which finally was not, certainly because she had a strong personality, too strong for some.
Sarah's motto was: "Anyway" ("Quand même")
"It was not a coincidence, but the result of a deliberate desire. At the age of nine, I had chosen this motto, after a formidable leap over a ditch that no one could jump at and which my young cousin had challenged me to; I had ruined my