Lives of Shakespearian Actors, Part VII:

Sarah Bernhardt, Helen Modjeska and Adelaide Ristori by their Contemporaries

European actresses are the focus of this, the seventh part in our on-going series on Shakespearian actors.

Sarah Bernhardt, born Sara-Marie-Henriette Rosine Bernardt was the daughter of Julie Bernardt and an unknown Dutch father. Born in Paris in 1844, she began her stage career in 1862 and rose to fame in the 1870s, soon finding herself in demand across all of Europe and also in New York. Referred to as ‘The Divine Sarah’, Bernhardt has been described as ‘the most famous actress in the history of the world’, yet still relatively little is known about her life – perhaps due to her notorious tendency to exaggerate, distort and glamorise the truth.

Adelaide Ristori was the daughter of Italian strolling players and began appearing on the stage as a young child. She first tasted success at just fourteen, playing the title role in an Italian version Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart and continued to enjoy comfortable success until she visited Paris in 1855. There she took the city by storm as Myrrha in Alfieri's play by the same name and aroused furious partisanship as a rival to the most popular Parisian actress of the day, Elisabeth Rachel Felix.

Born in Russian occupied Poland, Helena Modjeska was the illegitimate product of her Mother’s affair with a wealthy Polish nobleman. Her acting career began in 1862 under the guidance of her first husband but she enjoyed no great success until her emigration to America in 1876, where she gained a reputation as a leading Shakespearean actress and translator and produced the first American performance of Ibsen’s, A Doll’s House.

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