Sarah Bernhardt

May 19, 1906: Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress, concluded her Southern California tour, performing "La Tosca" at the Venice Auditorium. The Times reported that "as Floria Tosca, Madame Bernhardt puts forth her usual powers of intensity and emotional force" but added that the actress, then 61, lacked the "girlish spontaneity, physical vivaciousness and the youthful brilliance of voice that once was hers."

French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) is remembered as the greatest tragedienne of her day, but she also occupies an unfortunate place in the car culture of Los Angeles. Bernhardt was one of the first celebrities to be injured in an automobile accident in the City of Angels. The mishap occurred on the evening of March 12, 1913, at the intersection of Washington and Crenshaw boulevards, while she was being driven in a taxi to the downtown Orpheum Theatre to appear in "La Tosca.

What was Sarah Bernhardt like in performance? Ellen Terry provided the best description: "Smoke from a burning paper." That is not the impression left by Katherine Helmond in her one-and-a-half woman show, "Sarah in America," at the Pasadena Playhouse's Balcony Theatre. (Colette Duval plays Bernhardt's silent maid.) Helmond looks, and certainly dresses, the part of the star whom all the best people in New York went to see, but didn't care to "receive." The fascination of the Divine Sarah, however, is not felt.

Snakewoman of Little Egypt A Novel Robert Hellenga Bloomsbury USA: 342 pp., $25 Blend one anthropologist (Jackson), one young woman fresh out of prison for shooting and injuring her husband (Sunny), and that husband, a Pentecostal pastor from a serpent-handling church (Earl) and watch their lives twist around one another in utterly unpredictable ways. You are in Hellengaville, searching for your lost shaker of angst. Robert Hellenga's characters perpetually reenter the world, reinvent themselves, reconnect with one another in new ways.

Arlene Sterne is a 20th-Century actress fascinated with 19th-Century women of the stage. "I'd read a lot about these women, and I was struck by the similarities in their lives, their points of view, the parallels between them," says Sterne, whose 1979 one-woman show, "Final Curtain," had its West Coast premiere Thursday at the West End Playhouse.

French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) is remembered as the greatest tragedienne of her day, but she also occupies an unfortunate place in the car culture of Los Angeles. Bernhardt was one of the first celebrities to be injured in an automobile accident in the City of Angels. The mishap occurred on the evening of March 12, 1913, at the intersection of Washington and Crenshaw boulevards, while she was being driven in a taxi to the downtown Orpheum Theatre to appear in "La Tosca.

The controversy surrounding the Internet marketing of attractive young women's ova ("Photographer Puts Up Young Models' Genes for Sale," Oct. 24), recalls the 19th century tale of actress Sarah Bernhardt's suggestion to playwright George Bernard Shaw that he father her child. "Just think, monsieur," Bernhardt is said to have enthused, "a child with your brains and my looks!" "But madam," the brilliant, but physically unappealing, wit replied sensibly, "what if he should be born with your brains and my looks?"

Other than that Nixon can't spell cemetery (cimetiere) in French, he has at least one too many people buried there, Victor Hugo. There is a Hugo family tomb in Pere-Lachaise, but the great man has rested in the Pantheon since his death in 1885. Much to the disgust of the French and tourists who discover it, the grave of Jim Morrison has become the daily haven for drugged and drunken fans who have covered his tomb, bust and the surrounding area with graffiti. First-time visitors should stop at the gatehouse and buy the inexpensive mimeo map because it is more accurate than even the new Michelin "Paris" guide.

Dan Sullivan's parenthetical statement that being a liar is the basis of acting ("Helmond as Sarah Bernhardt: The Legend Doesn't Translate") reveals an ignorance of the craft unacceptable in a professional theater critic. He should know that the basis of all good acting is the truthful recreation of the artist's own experience brought into the context of the scene through creative imagination. This process has no more to do with lying than it does with pretending as children do at play.

Nearly A century before Tina Turner's current and possibly final tour, Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress of her time, made a similar journey. At 71, Bernhardt did not possess the remarkable health the 68-year-old Turner displayed Monday at the Staples Center. Instead of flashing two still-mighty legs for everyone to admire, Bernhardt hid one under her skirts; the other had been amputated after an infection, and she sat in a chair to deliver her soliloquies. Yet the Divine Sarah's voice and physical charisma still enraptured audiences in the U.S. and beyond, and the very fact of the tour, so seemingly defiant of mortality, added to an already considerable legend.

May 19, 1906: Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress, concluded her Southern California tour, performing "La Tosca" at the Venice Auditorium. The Times reported that "as Floria Tosca, Madame Bernhardt puts forth her usual powers of intensity and emotional force" but added that the actress, then 61, lacked the "girlish spontaneity, physical vivaciousness and the youthful brilliance of voice that once was hers."

WHEN Sarah Bernhardt had herself photographed at 35 in her coffin, she was already well on her way to becoming the best-known person of her era. By the time the legendary French actress truly died at 79, she had performed on stages all over the world, including four "farewell" tours of America, made eight films and endorsed face cream, cars and Bronx real estate.

Abundantly entertaining, Lillian Groag's "The Ladies of the Camellias," now at the Colony, is a gilt-edged valentine to the theater that begins as a frothy exegesis of eccentric celebrity and ends with a surprising philosophical punch. That gilt edge is not figurative. The stage is encompassed by a lavish gold-trimmed proscenium, a fitting framework for Tom Buderwitz's sumptuous set, which vividly re-creates a Paris theater, circa 1897.

More than 80 years after her death, Sarah Bernhardt has not yet seen her final curtain call. The tempestuous actress was arguably the world's first modern superstar, a proto-celebrity well before the advent of cinema would make such creatures commonplace. Imagine a Madonna capable of inspiring Oscar Wilde to pen "Salome" with her in mind and you get the idea.

Is it possible for a play with only two actors to seem cluttered? If the play is "Memoir" by John Murrell, which opened Saturday at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage here, the answer is yes, alas. The play, directed by Joseph Hardy, brings us the final lament-filled days of the immortal singer-actress-impresario Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) through a series of witty repartees with her longtime secretary and manservant, Georges Pitou.

WHEN Sarah Bernhardt had herself photographed at 35 in her coffin, she was already well on her way to becoming the best-known person of her era. By the time the legendary French actress truly died at 79, she had performed on stages all over the world, including four "farewell" tours of America, made eight films and endorsed face cream, cars and Bronx real estate.

Abundantly entertaining, Lillian Groag's "The Ladies of the Camellias," now at the Colony, is a gilt-edged valentine to the theater that begins as a frothy exegesis of eccentric celebrity and ends with a surprising philosophical punch. That gilt edge is not figurative. The stage is encompassed by a lavish gold-trimmed proscenium, a fitting framework for Tom Buderwitz's sumptuous set, which vividly re-creates a Paris theater, circa 1897.

The controversy surrounding the Internet marketing of attractive young women's ova ("Photographer Puts Up Young Models' Genes for Sale," Oct. 24), recalls the 19th century tale of actress Sarah Bernhardt's suggestion to playwright George Bernard Shaw that he father her child. "Just think, monsieur," Bernhardt is said to have enthused, "a child with your brains and my looks!" "But madam," the brilliant, but physically unappealing, wit replied sensibly, "what if he should be born with your brains and my looks?"

There is more insight than chance in actress-author Arlene Sterne's juxtaposition of three legendary actresses in her charming "Final Curtain" at the West End Playhouse. They may not have been the closest of friends, but they did know each other and often even played the same roles--Ellen Terry in England, Sarah Bernhardt in France and Eleonora Duse in Italy.