Sarah Bernhardt
The first global stage celebrity; she created theatrical stardom itself
She acted for sixty years, and at seventy, by then with one leg, performed for soldiers at the front. She was baptised at about ten, in 1856, at the convent school of Grandchamp: the grown-ups decided for her. She never once renounced her Jewishness, and she spoke of it when it was dangerous. After the Franco-Prussian war, when an attempt was made to wound her with her origins, she answered: "I am a daughter of the great Jewish race." To a reporter she put it more exactly and more awkwardly: "No, I am a Roman Catholic—and a member of the great Jewish race." In the Dreyfus affair she took Dreyfus's side, and a whole genre of antisemitic pamphleteering was turned on her—Marie Colombier, Jean Lorrain, Félicien Champsaur.
Her exact birthday cannot be given: the original record burned in the Paris fires of 1871. 22 October 1844 is printed here, with 23 October in some sources. In 1923 she accepted Catholic last rites; she had once told Gounod that she did not pray at all.
Sources
Scholarship
- Jewish Women's Archive, “Sarah Bernhardt” — the Jewish mother, the 1856 baptism, “a daughter of the great Jewish race”
Basis: documents and evidence.