HER FINAL EXIT.

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 74, 27 March 1923, Page 5

HER FINAL EXIT.

DEATH OF SARAH BERNHARDT.

PASSING OP A GREAT ACTRESS (By Cable—rrose Association.—Copyright.) (Received in.3o a.m. PARIS, March 26. Madame Sarah Bernhardt, the famous actress, died to-day after a loug illness. Madame Bernhardt'* condition seemed to be improved just before the end, and she was quite conscious of happenings around her. The doctors were amazed and declare that never in medical history did a woman nearing eighty with a career which had drawn so greatly upon her mental and physical forces survive so long a disease which wae draining her strength. — (A. and XX Ca,bfe.) SARAH BERNHARDT. HER FAILINGS AND HER GREATNESS. A TRIUMPH OF WILL. (By A. G. STEPHENS.) Think of the audacious energetic. Jewesses in the Bible from triumphant Miriam onwards, and you are thinking of Sarali Bernhardt, the best advertised European Jewess of the 10th century, lingering to the "20th century, dying: only yesterday aged 78. She had her own difference, of cotivse. but she was Jew emphatically: her race was her keynote. Sho was born in Paris on October 21, 184). Dan OVonnor, the figure of fun who was a Cabinet Minister of New South Wales thirty-one year* ago, vocally welcomed Sarah to Sydney, when she came on lior Australian health trip, as Sarah Barnard, and he was unintcntiun--lly right-. Her father was a I'reneh ew of the great Bernardus family, alrays with us in many patronymic anaitions; her mother was a Dutch 'ewess who had fourteen children mong them two pairs of twins. Sarah 'as the eleventh child. Keeling against Jews rung stron«lv nough in the Paris of Sarah's infancy, ml father Bernhardt. a lawyer professed .'hrMianity. •• My father" insisted on laving mc. baptised," she told J,,l e . s uret, who wrote her -Life.- After a ■hildhood spent in Holland, -'I was ent to the Augustine Convent at. Verallies. So. at tV age of twelve I lecame a Christian, was baptised onedav. 'ent to my first communion the next nd was confirmed with three of nutters on the third. 1 became pious " from-the convent, aged 14, she was aken a pupil at the Conservatoire 2s:^rr,:!e. Bcho ° l of ■*«•« *■■« She learned to b e a good actress: but lV VSS f T7 a « reat actress °" the lane o Rachel or Rfetori. She wa s -oo cold: she lacked passion. Her own taste wae for drawing and painting; she cu i tivatpd |t ]Rto f anf] modelled in clay as well, with performance enough to show that in the field Jf pictorial art also she c-ould have be■ome famous. Her career as actress was Jecded for her in childhood, by friends •vno noted her dramatic talent and ier remarkably expressive voice. R ut 'he said she felt no overwhelming vocation to the stage which for half a eenury she dominated and adorned. She liade her theatrical career in the way •hat, with the same intelligence and the >amc determination, she could have made a dozen various c-areers. Sarah hegan her studies at the Conservatoire without enthusiasm. "I wa< there because I had been taken there mit I had no taste for it, and felt no inclination whatever. Truly, the stage lid not attract mc; it rather made mc iinhappy to be there, and often I wept bitterly. Moreover, I was terribly timid. I thought that I would rather t>e a painter.' . But she kept on. At the first conJours she -won the second prize for tragedy, and in her last year the second prize for comedy. "I never was able to win first prize." After the iwnrd of the trasredv prize, Sarah was kept at. the Conservatoire 'by the directors of the Comedie Francaise. Her debut at the Francais as Tphigenie ias a dismal failure, and for three years fter Sarah was busy learning the reasons if her failure, and laving the foundations >f her success. She decided that the chief hinff wrong with her was her youth—a iplendid quality, but a professional defect vhich even- year was mending. She had o gain experience of the stage, and she iad to escape from the classical tradition md the official precedents of the great Theatre Francais. She had been an underjrown child: she was small and thin, vith only her personality to give her a itage presence. Later, helped by robes md decoration, her personality more than uffieed; on a bare stage, at the beginning, n a scanty Greek robe, it was not enough. She grew and cultivated herself. She left the Francais and went to the }deon, from 1866 to 1872, her second >eriod. She rejoined the Francaie from 1872 to 1880, her third period. Then she :ut loose and toured the world, accepting ■ngagements from England and the imericas, and employing such methods )f reclame that envious rivals called her Sarah Barnum. She played a short season in Australia, 185)1, opening at tfer Majesty's, Sydney, in "Camille," at prices which "staggered"' local theatrical luinanity of the epoch. By that time she vas super-famous and selling her fame. For thirty years after she held the ront of European notice —with her perormances on the stage and off —a wonderful woman, a sensational actress, with real merit to back her advertisement. Incidentally, in her thirties, she married a Monsieur Damala; another pacemaker whose gait did not agree with Sarah's She acquired a son, Maurice, and grandchildren to whon she was a loving grandmother. She made and squandered fortunes; she lime-lit herself with many eccentricities to captivate the'multitude; she enjoyed herself and had her own way. In " her long life she calculated that she had, on the stage, died by selfadministered poison 10,000 times; she had jumped into the scenic artist's Seine 7,000 times; she sent over 5,000 bullets into her head from a revolver, and 6.000 times plunged daggers deep down into the chiffon at the side of her bodice—"l was the morgue's best customer." At last she really dies with a high professional reputation, much of it deserved, in the •blaze of artistic glory and the odour of religious .sanctity. How could a woman do more? Yet, for a long time, in her early days French critics could not agree whether Sarah was an actress at all. Until 1874, with a lucky performance when she was thirty years old, she could not be said to have succeeded on the French stage. In the end they agreed that it. did not matter much whether, strictly speaking, she was an actress or not —she was Bern-