The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt.
Gold, Arthur; Fizdale, Robert.
Place Published: New York:
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf Inc,
Date Published: 1991.
Description: 8vo - over 7" - 9" tall. FIRST EDITION, STATED SECOND PRINTING. 349 pages with index. 102 black and white photos. The book is NEAR FINE with very small bump to front and back clothboard edges. The dust jacket is NEAR FINE with minor shelf wear. NOT price-clipped. Comes with BRODART jacket cover. Dust jacket reads: "SHE WAS the first-ever international superstar (fifty years before Hollywood existed), with as huge a following in America and England as in her native France. She was the inspiration for Alexandre Dumas's La Dame aux Camelias and Oscar Wilde's Salome. Hers is the face that epitomizes art nouveau, glittering in all its dangerous beauty from dozens of Alphonse Mucha posters that are still best-sellers wherever posters are sold. In her youth, she was hailed by le tout Paris; in 1923, the year she died, she was making a movie with Sacha Guitry. She was adored by Victor Hugo, Dumas (pere et fils), Wilde, and Jean Cocteau; Marcel Proust immortalized her as the actress Berma in Remembrance of Things Past. Her tigerish sexuality fascinated Freud and D. H. Lawrence. She is the only actress in history ever to triumph as both Ophelia and Hamlet; it was her "modern" style that revolutionized acting itself and in turn gave birth to the naturalism that reigns today. After years of research, Robert Fizdale and the late Arthur Gold have delved beneath the layers of legend and fiction (much of it promulgated irrepressibly by Sarah Bernhardt herself) to give us a glorious portrait of this exquisitely beautiful, iron-willed, and tempestuous young girl, the daughter of a Jewish courtesan in Paris (and intended, like Gigi, for the same career), who profited from the influence of one of her mother's aristocratic lovers to wangle a precious place as a student at the Comedie Francaise, and from there launched herself into immortality. Drawing on her own writings (and those of her most jealous rival, the actress-cocotte Marie Colombier); on a wealth of never-before-published letters, including her most private correspondence to lovers, friends, and her adored son, Maurice; on the reminiscences and critical appraisals of friends and admirers (and detractors) like Henry James, Chekhov, and James Agate; and on their own profound understanding as great artists in their own right, Gold and Fizdale have given us a unique perspective on the joys and sorrows, the terrors and ultimate exhilaration, of the life of the performer. The result is a living portrait of one of the supreme artists of the theater."
Edition: First editionBinding: Hard Back
Condition: Near Fine in Near Fine dj
ISBN: 0394528794
Book Id: 6120
Price: $19.00
