Authors: Robert Gottlieb
ISBN-13: 9780300141276, ISBN-10: 0300141270
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Yale University Press
Date Published: September 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Robert Gottlieb is the author of the acclaimed Balanchine: The Ballet Maker. He writes for the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications, and is dance critic for the New York Observer. His career in publishing—as editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker—is legendary.
Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious careerredefining the very nature of her artto 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 quarrelover 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, Gottlieb’s Sarah is the first English-language biography to appear in decades. Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory through which an illegitimateand scandalousdaughter of a courtesan transformed herself into the most famous actress who ever lived, and into a national icon, a symbol of France.
…a smart and sprightly biography. Robert Gottlieb shows how Bernhardt nurtured celebrity with her outlandish style and exaggerated stories about herself, or even made them up entirely.