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The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
Yale University Press
October 2010
On Sale: September 21, 2010
256 pages
ISBN: 0300141270
EAN: 9780300141276
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious careerβredefining the very nature of her artβto her amazing (and highly public) romantic life to her indomitable spirit. Well into her seventies, after the amputation of her leg, she was performing under bombardment for soldiers during World War I, as well as crisscrossing America on her ninth American tour. Her family was also a source of curiosity: the mother she adored and who scorned her; her two half-sisters, who died young after lives of dissipation; and most of all, her son, Maurice, whom she worshiped and raised as an aristocrat, in the style appropriate to his presumed father, the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Only once did they quarrelβover the Dreyfus Affair. Maurice was a right-wing snob; Sarah, always proud of her Jewish heritage, was a passionate Dreyfusard and Zolaist. Though the Bernhardt literature is vast, Gottliebβs Sarah is the first English-language biography to appear in decades. Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory through which an illegitimateβand scandalousβdaughter of a courtesan transformed herself into the most famous actress who ever lived, and into a national icon, a symbol of France.
 Media BuzzDiane Rehm Show - NPR - December 30, 2010
Diane Rehm Show - NPR - September 21, 2010
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