Sarah Bernhardt and the Invention of Celebrity

The French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was the first global celebrity: the first artist to be eclipsed by her image in her own lifetime, and the first to inhabit that image on multiple continents. Bernhardt first became renowned in France as a tragic actress, but then became a celebrity, as notorious for her exotic offstage life as she was admired for her onstage roles. In Britain and America, however, she began as a famous French actress, a figure combining the spectacle of theatrical performance with the spectacle of offstage celebrity.