Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardtwas a French stage and early film actress. She was referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known", and is regarded as one of the finest actors of all time. Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, at the beginning of the Belle Epoque period, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas. She developed a reputation as a sublime dramatic actress and tragedienne, earning the nickname "The...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionStage Actress
Date of Birth22 October 1844
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.
A defective voice will always preclude an artist from achieving the complete development of his art, however intelligent he may be.... The voice is an instrument which the artist must learn to use with suppleness and sureness, as if it were a limb.
I refuse the title of artist to those who owe their reputations to a physical deformity. I regard them as buffoons.
What matters poverty? What matters anything to him who is enamoured of our art? Does he not carry in himself every joy and every beauty?
The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province ofwoman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.
Art is not about something, Art is something
The artist's personality must be left in his dressing-room; his soul must be denuded of its own sensations and clothed with the base or noble qualities he is called upon to exhibit.... [he] must leave behind him the cares and vexations of life, throw aside his personality for several hours, and move in the dream of another life, forgetting everything.
To be a good actor . . . it is necessary to have a firmly tempered soul, to be surprised at nothing, to resume each minute the laborious task that has barely just been finished.
Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
It is in spending oneself that one becomes rich.
The monster of advertisement... 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.
I do love cricket - it's so very English.
Each action of the actor on the stage should be the visible concomitant of his thoughts.
Your words are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me.