Renee Lilley

Sarah Bernhardt as Pierrot in Jean Richepin’s Pierrot assassin, 1883; photograph by Paul Nadar

“It is no wonder that we know so little about the woman who was the world’s most famous actress for the best part of half a century. When Sarah Bernhardt died in 1923, almost half a million people lined the streets of Paris. Most of them had seen her on stage and in movies, performing as though each plot were a conduit for her own emotions and as though every play from Racine’s Phèdre to Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias had been written as a psychobiography of Sarah Bernhardt. “No temperament more histrionic than Mme Bernhardt’s has, perhaps, ever existed,” wrote the obituarist of the London Times. “To read her memoirs is to live in a whirl of passions and adventures—floods of tears, tornadoes of rage, deathly sickness and incomparable health and energy.” As Robert Gottlieb warns in his appropriately lively biography, “She was a complete realist when dealing with her life but a relentless fabulist when recounting it.”

-The Divine Sarah by Graham Robb

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I found everything I need today for my Pierrot costume, and then I looked up more photos to make sure (though i’ll be my own rendition of the character anyways); I found this and think it’s absolutely wonderful and this photo is so beautiful.