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Sarah (Canadian, 1976, 90 minutes, color, video)
Directed by Waris Hussein
Written by Suzanne Grossman
A Canandian Broadcasting Company production
Cast: Zoe Caldwell . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Bernhardt
Edward Atienza . . . . . . . . . . Perrin
Donald Davis . . . . . . . . . .Edward Jarrett
Dawn Greenhalgh . . . . . . . . . . Agar
Thomas Hauff . . . . . . . . . . Maurice
NOTE: Zoe Caldwell, the star of Sarah, will talk about her life and work on Tuesday, October 29 at 8 P.M. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center on the UAlbany uptown campus. One of the leading figures of the 20th century stage on both sides of the Atlantic, and winner of four Tony Awards, Caldwell is the author of a memoir, I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress’s Journey (2001).
Sarah, a biographical drama about the life of Victorian stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, served as the opener of the critically-acclaimed Canadian Broadcasting Company series, Front Row Centre, a program similar in style and content to Public Television’s Masterpiece Theatre. Starring eminent stage actress Zoe Caldwell, Sarah was nominated for a Best Drama Emmy of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Zoe Caldwell regards the television production as one of her best performances on film or video. Sarah was directed by Indian-born British filmmaker Waris Hussein, known for such made-for-television biopics as Onassis: The Richest Man in the World (1988), and Little Gloria… Happy at Last (1982), the story of Gloria Vanderbilt.
"She understands the art of motion and attitude as no one else does, and her extraordinary personal grace never fails her."
— Henry James on actress Sarah Bernhardt
The following is taken from an article by Katrina Roberts about Sarah Bernhardt’s role as a theatrical icon that appeared in Harvard Magazine, Sep.-Oct. 1998:
Though she succumbed to an estimated 40,000 stage deaths before her own demise at the dawn of the film era, the celebrated French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) lives today. "Whether we’re 20 or 70, she’s embedded in our subconscious," says art historian Carol Ockman, a Bunting Institute fellow. Bernhardt’s ways of representing female sexuality and ethnicity influenced performers such as Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, and Barbara Streisand; in the 1941 film Babes on Broadway, Judy Garland impersonated "the divine Sarah." Bernhardt’s memoir, Ma Double Vie, admits that positioning herself for posterity was crucial—she was "in it for the long haul," Ockman says.
If Bernhardt succeeded in gaining cultural immortality, it may be partly because her career coincided with the rise of recording technologies—photography, gramophone, film—and partly because she was one of the first stars to attain "icon" status. Bernhardt was "like Madonna, only better," says Ockman, observing that Bernhardt may even have been a prototype for the self-reincarnating "bad girl" that Madonna exemplifies a century later.
In a "visual iconography," a work in progress titled Who Do You Think You Are, Sarah Bernhardt? Ockman uses the actress to explore how icons are created, remembered, and reinvented. Popular icons are a species of sacred personage, public figures whose visibility lets them serve as projection screens for the loves, fears, anxieties, and dreams of the collective imagination. One key to iconic success, Ockman says, is to give audiences repeatedly what they want and expect while simultaneously rendering it new. Thus, Bernhardt satisfied audience appetites with oft-repeated roles such as Camille. Yet in later years she turned to male or "breeches" roles (not uncommon at the time), and at age 55 caused a stir with her portrayal of Hamlet. After having created an image of heightened female sexuality with her "womanly" interpretations, the cross-dressed performances made audiences long for the "real" Sarah Bernhardt. ""She was creating a demand," Ockman says, "for precisely the female sexuality she was suppressing."
Dichotomies lie at the heart of icons: witness Madonna’s early persona, combining suggestive attire with crucifixes, an overtly sexual manner with allusions to dubious virginal status. One polarity that Bernhardt embraced was high and popular culture: the actress established her reputation at France’s premier legitimate theater, the Comédie Française, where, from 1862 through 1880, she offered romantic interpretations of classical roles like Racine's Phèdre. Yet, after two decades of success in what Ockman calls "the sacred precincts," Bernhardt left the legitimate stage—and earned iconic stature, along with vast sums of money—by spending the next 40 years in boulevard theater, popular vaudeville shows, and early film roles. . . .
Like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, Bernhardt was unangelic, a besmirched or "dirty:" star. She had her motto, "Quand Même" ("even so," or loosely, "against all odds") embroidered on linens, printed on visiting cards, engraved on her revolver, and even carved into the coffin that she may sometimes have used as a bed. Her fame did indeed confound probability: Bernhardt’s personal history and behavior seemed almost designed to tar her with every possible nineteenth-century social stigma. The illegitimate daughter of a Dutch-Jewish mother and an absent French father, she clung to her Jewishness while practicing Catholicism. Early in life she was a pricey call girl, like her mother and aunt before her; she lived a sexually promiscuous life, taking innumerable male, and perhaps some female, lovers. Bernhardt became an unwed mother and took up side careers—sculptor, painter, author—generally considered reserved for males. Her thin body was quite out of fashion, while her illnesses (tuberculosis, neurasthenia) and the eventual amputation of a leg in 1915 were, says Ockman, further "indices of womanhood gone awry."
Yet none of these could suppress Bernhardt’s popularity. In fact, her stigmata may have enhanced it. She could command the exorbitant salary of $7,000 per week—double that of other headliners—and was so wildly revered that the Barnum organization allegedly cabled her an offer of $10,000 to display her severed leg. After the amputation, she disdained prosthetic devices and crutches; bearers carried the divine Sarah around in a sedan chair.
In other words, like a royal personage. In a sense, that is what the actress was. Figures like Princess Diana are another type of icon: venerated individuals whose virtues and foibles are scrutinized, exposing them to both adoration and woe. Bernhardt's complexity—her ambivalent expressions of sexuality, for example—actually launched her toward the stars.
Today’s mass media provide much richer rocket fuel. "Our capacities and technologies for greater communication raise questions about how we will create and define icons in the future," Ockman says. Bernhardt herself may have dimly foreseen what was to come. In 1880, newly arrived in the United States for a tour, she visited Thomas Alva Edison in New Jersey to record her voice via phonograph. "She didn’t speak or sing," Ockman says. ""She declaimed." Imagine the diva, standing beside this most amazing contraption, peering, clear-eyed, into our future.
The following is taken from an article by Michael Buckley that appeared in TheaterMania, December 31, 2001:
"I knew at a very early age," writes Zoe Caldwell at the beginning of her jewel box of a memoir, I Will Be Cleopatra, "that my job would be to stand in front of people, keeping them awake and in their seats by telling other people's stories and using other people’s words. I knew this because it was the only thing I could do. Internationally acclaimed, Caldwell has succeeded in telling stories exceptionally well. Her job, she believes, is "to not get in the way of the playwright’s words. We’re in big trouble when you hear actors talk about themselves as ‘artists.’ We’re more like priestesses and priests. We take the word from the playwright to the populace. If you don’t get in the way too much, the audience will understand exactly what the playwright wants them to know. If you start bringing your own life into it—saying, ‘Oh, my God, if I dig deeply enough, I can remember a time when I was so hurt...blah, blah, blah.’ That’s fine. Write your own play!"
Having created roles in only six Broadway plays, Caldwell has earned Tonys for four: Slapstick Tragedy, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Medea, and Master Class (as Maria Callas). Her other Broadway credits are The Creation of the World and Other Business and Lillian (as Lillian Hellman). Off-Broadway, she starred in Colette, Dance of Death (opposite Robert Shaw), and A Perfect Ganesh….
The Australian-born actress made her professional debut at nine, playing Slightly Soiled in a production of Peter Pan. During her teens, she did extensive radio work. After that came many years of performing Shakespeare, Shaw, and the classics—starting Down Under and journeying to England, Canada, and the U.S, she progressed from walk-ons to leads. Broadway beckoned in 1966 when she was asked to substitute for a vacationing Anne Bancroft in The Devils. (She relates in her book that she prepared for her performances as a hunchback nun while walking to the theater: "I would walk one block with curvature of the spine and one block upright.")
In 1977, Caldwell made her Broadway directorial bow with An Almost Perfect Person. Her work as a director on the New York stage also includes These Men, Othello, Macbeth, Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, and Vita and Virginia. On television, the actress has been seen in the title role of Sarah, playing Sarah Bernhardt for British TV (1976); recreating her role as Medea for a 1982 telecast; portraying Carlotta Monterey O'Neill in a 1985 PBS presentation, Eugene O'Neill: A Glory of Ghosts; and a 1990 Disney Channel film, Lantern Hill. Amazingly, Caldwell has appeared in only one feature film to date: Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, in 1985.
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.