The instant expert: Sarah Bernhardt

The life and times of "the most famous actress the world has ever known".

THE BASICS Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and silent era film actress who earned global renown and the nickname "the Divine Sarah". She may have been the first performer to gain the cult-like status of such later celebrities as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. The biographer Robert Gottlieb calls her "the most famous actress the world has ever known".

THE BEGINNINGS Bernhardt was born Rosine Bernard in Paris, an illegitimate child of mixed French-Dutch parentage and of partly Jewish descent. She enrolled at the age of 13 in the drama school of the Paris Conservatoire. Her 1862 stage debut at the Théâtre Français (later the Comédie-Française) was of little note. She left France for Belgium, where she had an affair with a nobleman and bore his son. How very French...

THE BREAKTHROUGH Back in Paris, Bernhardt won adoration in 1869 at the Odeon National Theatre as Zanetto, the minstrel in François Coppee's Le Passant. She was soon in demand across Europe and the Americas, and enthralled audiences with her voix d'or (golden voice) and her realistic, physical and emotional acting. She performed with such intensity that she often fainted at the end of the play.

THE MULTI-TASKER Bernhardt sculpted. She painted. She wrote. She ran her own theatre. She coached young actresses. She commissioned photographs and portraits of herself, and posters of her shows. She endorsed soap and bicycles. She made - and spent - some US$25 million. She was a talented, independent and savvy businesswoman and artist, far ahead of her time. Little wonder many women still worship her.

A CRITIC IN AWE The French dramatist, professor and critic Jules Lemaître (1853-1914) once said of Bernhardt: "She could enter a convent, discover the North Pole, have herself inoculated with rabies, assassinate an emperor or marry a Negro king without astonishing me."

QUELLE HORREUR! The actress hurt her right knee in 1905 in Rio de Janeiro in a jump off the parapet in La Tosca. The injury failed to heal, gangrene set in and her leg was amputated in 1915. She didn't like using a wooden prosthetic, and continued her career mostly without one.

OOH LA LA Bernhardt claimed to have had more than 1,000 lovers - many of them important writers and artists - but was a notorious liar. She married once, to Jacques Damala - a Greek military officer turned actor - in 1882. They separated a year later.

TRIVIA A meringue-like chocolate cake, a chocolate truffle-like cookie and a pink peony are all named after the Divine Sarah.

THE WILD ONE Bernhardt loved wild animals. She kept a champagne-drinking alligator, a lion and six chameleons. She is said to have asked a surgeon to attach a tiger tail to her but was told it was physically impossible.

A MACABRE QUIRK Bernhardt bought a coffin at the age of 15 and frequently slept in it. It was lined with letters from the men in her life. So it was fairly well cushioned.

A PERSPECTIVE Monroe's character in The Seven Year Itch, while filming a toothpaste commercial, makes the cogent observation: "People don't realise, but when I show my teeth on TV I appear before more people than Sarah Bernhardt ever did." Then she sighs and asks, wistfully: "Was she magnificent?"

ADIEU Bernhardt died on March 26, 1923 from uremia following kidney failure. She was 78.

On the screen

Sarah Bernhardt is said to have had a love-hate affair with early cinema, detesting her appearance on screen but loving the lavish income.

Foremost among her 11 films are:

HAMLET (1900) A two-minute-long scene adapted from Shakespeare's play. The actors' voices were pre-recorded and then played at screenings, so it was technically not a silent film.

TOSCA (1908) A one-reel condensation of the play of the same name by Victorien Sardou. Bernhardt toured the world in the stage drama.

CAMILLE (1911) A two-reel condensation of the play adapted from the Alexandre Dumas novel. Bernhardt starred in the role on stages in Paris, London and Broadway.

QUEEN ELIZABETH (1912) A four-reel adaptation of the play about the love affair between Elizabeth I of England and the Earl of Essex.

MOTHERS OF FRANCE (1915) AND JEANNE DORÉ (1916) First World War morale-boosters in each of which Bernhardt plays a widowed mother.

THE CLAIRVOYANT (1923) Bernhardt, mortally ill in real life, has a five-minute death scene in this, her last film.