French actress (1844-1923)
Politics and governments -- they are more than I can understand. Present systems are corrupted by personal ambition. It is all so complicated and insincere. Conditions are much worse now than they were during the war. In 1914 we went into the fight without argument. We finished it with very little, but now, strangely enough, comes all the wrangling, the restrictions, the selfishness.
SARAH BERNHARDT
"Bernhardt Triumphs in New Role", Theatre Magazine, 1920
Me pray? Never! I'm an atheist.
SARAH BERNHARDT
attributed, What Great Men Think of Religion
I refuse the title of artist to those who owe their reputations to a physical deformity. I regard them as buffoons.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Art of the Theatre
The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Art of the Theatre
My life has been a struggle -- a struggle to have my own way where I felt I was in the right.
SARAH BERNHARDT
"The first modern celebrity was born 175 years ago", Vox, June 26, 2019
Eleonora Duse is more a comedian than an artiste. She walks in paths that have been traced out by others. She does not imitate them, certainly not, for she plants flowers where there were trees and trees where there were flowers, but she has never by her art made a single personage stand out identified by her name; she has not created a being or a vision which reminds one of herself. She has put on other people's gloves, but she has put them on inside out. And all this she has done with infinite grace and with careless unconsciousness.
SARAH BERNHARDT
Memories of My Life
The courtesy of the well-educated man vanishes before the footlights, and the comedian, who in private life would render a service to a woman in any difficulty, will pick a quarrel with her on the stage. He would risk his life to save her from any danger in the road, on the railway, or on a boat, but when once on the boards he will not do anything to help her out of a difficulty. If her memory should fail, or if she should make a false step, he would not hesitate to push her--I am going a long way, perhaps, but not so far as people may think.
SARAH BERNHARDT
Memories of My Life
The actor is too prone to exaggerate his powers; he wants to play Hamlet when his appearance is more suitable to King Lear.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Art of the Theatre
Had my child been a clergyman's probably he would have been strangled at birth.
SARAH BERNHARDT
response to a clergyman who denounced her for having a child out of wedlock, "The first modern celebrity was born 175 years ago", Vox, June 26, 2019
The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Art of the Theatre
Can philosophy and religion evolve without danger in the same mind?
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Idol of Paris
Life is, alas, one eternal combat.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Idol of Paris
Although all new ideas are born in France, they are not readily adopted there. It seems that they must first commence to prosper in a foreign country.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Art of the Theatre
Permanent success cannot be achieved except by incessant intellectual labour, always inspired by the ideal.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Art of the Theatre
In the theater it is better to have long arms, long rather than short: an actor with short arms can never make a fine gesture!
SARAH BERNHARDT
My Double Life
I know very well that the theatre is Sodom and Gomorrah in one.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Idol of Paris
I am always studying character. Everyone I meet is a new study.
SARAH BERNHARDT
The Strand Magazine, 1895
Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrity when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves. They are at the beginning of a series of small worries, thunderbolts hidden under flowers, but they know how to hold in check that monster advertisement. It is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public when it is vomiting its black gall. But those who are caught in the clutches of celebrity at the age of twenty two know nothing.
SARAH BERNHARDT
My Double Life
My costume was a failure; it did not fit me. They had always jeered at me for my thinness and in this dress I looked like an English teapot.
SARAH BERNHARDT
Memories of My Life
I am so superstitious that if I had arrived when there was no sunshine I should have been wretched and most anxious until after my first performance. It is a perfect torture to be superstitious to this degree, and, unfortunately for me, I am ten times more so now than I was in those days, for besides the superstitions of my own country, I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me. I cannot walk a single step or make any movement or gesture, sit down, go out, look at the sky or ground, without feeling some reason for hope or despair, until at last, exasperated by the trammels put upon my actions by my thought, I defy all superstitions and just act as I want to act.
SARAH BERNHARDT
My Double Life