Leading Ladies: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry
In the latter half of the 19th Century three actresses ruled supreme in the hearts of theatre-goers: the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), the Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), and the English Ellen Terry (1847-1928). They played all parts: from the classics of Shakespeare and Racine, through the romantics such as Dumas and d’Annunzio, to the new naturalists such as Ibsen. They toured the world but acted only in their mother tongue. Their emotional intensity and stage presence communicated with their audiences even when their words were not understood. They were the first superstars: idolized by their public, celebrated by artists, and honored by poets.
Beginnings
Both Ellen Terry and Eleonora Duse were born to parents who were travelling players, and both began acting in childhood. Eleonora Duse and her father continued acting after the death of Eleonora’s mother in 1875. In 1879, Eleonora received her first rave reviews for her performances as Ophelia in Hamlet and Elettra in Oreste at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples. She married a fellow actor in 1881 and had a daughter Enrichetta before the two separated.
Although five of her siblings became professional actors, Ellen Terry was initially disillusioned with the theater. At the age of 16 years, she married the painter George Watts who was 30 years her senior. The marriage was unhappy, and Ellen left after a year to live with the architect Edward Godwin, with whom she had two children, Edith and Edward, who later used the fictitious surname, Craig, and who both became renowned theater-directors. Godwin encouraged Terry to act again and she was acclaimed as Portia in The Merchant of Venice in 1875, a role that she reprised many times over her career (Holyroyd, 2008, p 102).
Sarah Bernhardt was the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan, and only came to the theater after finishing her education at a convent school. The Duc de Mornay, the half-brother of Napoleoon III and a patron of her mother, suggested that she audition for Le Conservatoire national de musique et de declamation. With his influence she was accepted, and studied there between 1860 and 1862. After leaving the conservatoire she acted at the Odéon theater but her initial roles were not successful. Though she continued to act, her main support over the next decade came from her life as a courtesan. She counted among her many lovers a Marshall of the French army, a Spanish banker, and a Turkish ambassador (Gottlieb, 2010, p 44). She likely had an affair with Victor Hugo when he directed his play Ruy Blas at the Comédie Française in 1872 (Gottleib, 2010, p 61). Though some 40 years her senior Hugo was still susceptible to female charms. Bernhardt had her first major triumph as Maria, Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas, and followed this by an acclaimed Phèdre in Racine’ tragedy in 1874.
The Acting Companies
Bernhardt’s subsequent successes at the Comédie Française allowed her to obtain backers for her own company in 1880. She put on La dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, and then took her company on tour to London and the United States. She had affairs with her leading actors and was briefly married to a Greek diplomat. She attracted the attention of Victorien Sardou who wrote several plays for her, notably Fédora (1882), Théodora (1884), La Tosca (1887) and Cléopâtre (1890). She arranged with Alphonse Mucha to produce magnificent art-deco posters for her shows:
Bernhardt became friends with artists and celebrities: Gustave Doré, the illustrator of Dante, the portraitist Georges Clairin, Edward VII of England when he was Prince of Wales, and Louise Abbéma, an impressionist painter and prominent lesbian. It is unclear how many of her friends were also lovers.
In 1899, the theater built by Baron Haussmann on the Place du Châtelet in Paris was renovated and renamed the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, a name it retained until the German occupation in 1941 when it was called the Théâtre de la Cité because of Bernhardt’s Jewish ancestry (Gottlieb, 2010, p 139).
Duse formed her own acting company in 1885. She had a prolonged affair with Arrigo Boito, who was later to serve as Verdi’s librettist for Otello and Falstaff. Boito provided her with the play Cleopatre, a translation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in 1887. The illustration below shows the competing Cleopatras of Duse and Bernhardt (Rader, 2018, pp 83-84):
In 1895 Duse had an affair with the poet and playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio. He wrote the play La Gioconda (1899) for her. However, later in 1899 when he sent his masterpiece La città morta, based on Ancient Greek tragedies, to her rival Sarah Bernhardt, Duse ended their affair. Nevertheless, she later performed in both this play and in d’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1901) about the tragic love affair between Francesca and her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta, as told in Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno.
When Duse toured Russia in 1891, she impressed the young Anton Chekhov. Duse was to become the model for Irina Arkadina in The Seagull (1895). During her tour of Russia, Duse presented Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She was particularly fond of the role: Nora, the name of the heroine, is a diminutive of her own name (Rader, 2018, p 103). She later included other Ibsen plays in her repertoire, and visited the playwright in Oslo in 1904. After 1910, Duse had a long relationship with Lina Poletti, a poet, playwright and open Lesbian, but this was likely no more than friendship (Weaver, 1984, pp 286-290).
In 1878 Henry Irving and Ellen Terry formed a partnership to reopen the Lyceum Theatre in London. For the next 20 years, they acted together to great acclaim. Their repertoire centered on Shakespeare – Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Rome and Juliet, Macbeth, and Much Ado about Nothing – but they also presented other plays – Becket by Tennyson, Olivia by W. G. Wills derived from The Vicar of Wakefield, and King Charles I by William Havard. It is not known whether their relationship extended beyond the theater. Below are woodcuts of Irving and Terry by Terry’s son Edward Craig from about 1895.
Terry kept up a long epistolary relationship with Bernard Shaw, who found her an intelligent and witty correspondent. Despite the many letters, however, they only met occasionally. Terry played Lady Cicely Waynefleete in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1906, one of her last important roles. In 1958 a set of eighteen unsigned love poems to Ellen Terry went on auction. Though attributed to Shaw (Werner, 1980), these poems were probably written by Christabel Marshall, who was Terry’s secretary for several years. Christabel ultimately changed her name to Christopher Marie St John, and became the romantic partner of Terry’s daughter Edy Craig (Holroyd, 2008, pp 321-330).
Portraits
Bernhardt, Duse and Terry were the beauties of their day. They were the subject of glamorous portraits such as Michele Gordigiani’s 1896 portrait of Duse and Georges Clairin’s 1876 portrait of Bernhardt:
The following are portraits of Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra by Georges Rochegrosse (1890), of the young Ellen Terry by her husband George Watts (1864) and of Eleonora Duse by Giovanni Boldini (1895):
Ilya Repin made a striking charcoal sketch of Duse during her tour of Russia in 1891:
Photographs
Nicéphore Niéce took the first photograph in 1822. By the middle of the 19th Century photography had become widespread. Felix Nadar, the first genius of photographic portraiture, produced several images of the young Sarah Bernhardt in the early 1860s.
The following is Adam Begley’s description of the portraits:
Loosely wrapped in a white burnoose, or in a shiny black velvet cloak, both garments voluminous, their folds teasingly suggestive, she leans on a truncated fluted column—a vulgar prop Nadar would have laughed at a decade earlier. It doesn’t matter: the eyes are otherwise occupied, caressing her flawless skin, her calm pensive face, her untamed hair. It’s not just that she appears to be naked under her wrap—the portraits carry an erotic charge that’s complicated and enhanced by the withdrawn, private ex-pression and a whisper of melancholy. The air of mystery is especially strong when she’s wearing the black velvet and looking off to her right, almost in profile; the focus is slightly blurred, her bright eyes distant and enigmatic. Her sole ornament, a cameo earring, less a decoration than an echo in miniature, draws attention to her elfin ear, deliberately exposed and adding to the impression of nakedness. (Begley 2017, p 110)
Richard Howard’s poem Hommage to Nadar – Sarah Bernhardt (2004) celebrates both the photographer and his subject:
Often enough you were naked under the cloak
in those days; gentlemen drank
and waited, murmuring deprecations
till the cloak dropped and your arms
which would dishevel the world – those white serpents,
Hugo called them – were exposed,
thin as your legs, thin and white, but rusted here,
then here, the rest white and hard . . .
Not yet: you have not yet had success on the stage,
and if you were a mother two
years back, Maurice never knew his father –
did you? A nun, you wanted
to be a nun, and became a sculptor, one
craning female torso sent
each year to the Salon, ardent clay ladies
in postures of possession.
Mortal will is already your mode, undressed,
uncombed, probably unwashed –
you are the child he wrote in French for, Oscar
who understood your crying
need and overheard, just thirty years too late,
the voice of Salome, pure
gold bangles on a tin wire pulled to breaking,
and of course the wire did break.
You seem to be regarding, on cue but still
offstage, in the studio,
the resonant hells your talent sanctified
for decades of unbelievers.
and taught your century its lesson, dying
in La Gloire, your last relâche
attended by a house of fifty thousand:
dazed Paris, unforgiving,
relented for your farewell tour of duty
which was to doubt if either
the Heavenly City or that wan shade of it
our dreams have perpetuated
can function, flourish or even form unless
it include its opposite,
unless in heaven there is hell. Divine Sarah.
The poem mentions that Bernhardt was also a competent sculptor. Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French expressly for Bernhardt although she never played the role. La Gloire is likely a late performance in d’Annunzio’s La gloria which had been translated into French. The theatrical term en relâche is used to describe the days when a play is not performed so that the actors can rest. The English idiom is that the theater is “dark.” Bernhardt continued working until a few days before her death. “Fifty thousand” is the estimated number who attended her funeral in 1923.
Terry and Duse were also photographed extensively. The following illustration shows a portrait of Ellen Terry by Julia Margaret Cameron taken in 1864, and a portrait of Eleonora Duse by Edward Steichen taken in 1903. The latter was taken using a soft focus, a style popular at the beginning of the 20th Century but eschewed by later photographers.
Costumes
Bernhardt, Terry and Duse all revelled in their costumes. Those of Ellen Terry were particularly striking. Edward Burne-Jones designed her outfits for Guinevere and Lawrence Alma-Tadema for Imogen. The most memorable of her costumes was the “beetle-dress” that she wore as Lady Macbeth. The gown, designed by Alice Laura Comyns-Carr and made by Ada Cort Nettleship, is embellished with green iridescent beetle wing-cases that shimmer under stage lighting. The dress has recently been restored. The illustration below shows the dress and a painting of Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargeant (1888).
Lithographs
Lithography was invented in 1796 and come to prominence over the following century as a means for producing inexpensive color prints. William Nicholson published a set of Twelve Portraits in 1899: lithographic reproductions of hand-coloured woodcuts. Among those represented was Sarah Bernhardt. Eleonora Duse was included in a second set of portraits which came out in 1902.These portraits are shown below. In 1906 Nicholson produced for the Ellen Terry Jubilee Banquet a lithographic scroll showing all the major roles from her career. The middle section shows Ellen Terry as Lady Teazle from The School for Scandal (1877), Olivia from Olivia (1878), Ophelia from Hamlet (1878), Queen Henrietta Maria from King Charles I by William Havard (1879), and Portia from The Merchant of Venice:
Audio Recordings
In the early years of the 20th Century, it became possible to record the sounds of voices. Both Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt were recorded. Although the recordings are noisy and the studio recordings very different from an actual performance, the listener can get some sense of how they sounded on the stage.
The recording of Ellen Terry giving Portia’s speech about mercy was taken in 1911. The words of the speech follow together with a painting by George Baldry of Terry as Portia in an 1895 production. Terry’s presentation is restrained but convincing:
I could not find any audio recordings of Eleonora Duse. We must content herself with a description by Arthur Symons, the British critic and poet who lived for a while in Italy and who translated several of d’Annunzio’s works:
And then that voice of hers! It can be sweet or harsh, it can laugh or cry, can be menacing or caressing. And how every word tells! Every word comes to you clearly, carrying exactly its meaning: and, somehow along with the words, an emotion, which you may resolve to ignore, but which will seize on you, which will go through and through you. Trick or instinct, there it is, the power to make you feel intensely; and that is precisely the final test of a great dramatic artist. (Symons, 1926, p 99)
The following is an excerpt from a 1910 recording of Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Phèdre. Phèdre the wife of Theseus has fallen passionately in love with her stepson Hippolytus. She confesses her shame and asks him to punish her with death.
In the Words of the Poets.
The young Oscar Wilde was quite taken by Terry’s performance of Portia. The following is his sonnet to the actress. Since I could not find any image of the golden dress, I have paired the sonnet with a portrait of Terry by Forbes-Robertson from about the same time:
Wilde was perhaps even more impressed by Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre. The accompanying photograph was taken by Felix Nadar’s son Paul:
The young playwright Edmond Rostand, author of the wildly successful Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) wrote several plays for Sarah Bernhardt, among them La Samaritaine (1897), about the Samaritan women who gave up a life of sin to follow Christ, and l’Aiglon (Eaglet, 1900) about the Napoleon’s son. At a celebratory dinner in 1896 he presented a sonnet in praise of Sarah:
The sonnet is mainly remembered for the line Reine de l’Attitude ed Princesse des Gestes. No one could strike a pose as well as Sarah. The following is the death of La Dame aux Camélias, probably from a production in the early 1900s:
In 1907, the American poet Sara Teasdale published four sonnets in honor of Eleonora Duse. The following sonnet about her performance in Francesca da Rimini was set to music by Robert Owen. Below is a performance by soprano Jamie Reimer and pianist Stacie Haneline:
Imaginings
It is difficult for us to understand the effect these actresses had on their audiences. We have some general idea:
Ellen Terry lives on as the eternal girl actress, the symbol of health, youth, and energy, in contrast with Duse, the suffering, mature woman. Between them stands Bernhardt, the creature of passion and power, larger than life and dangerously unpredictable. (Stokes et al, 1988, p 10).
And yet
Whatever audiences perceived in the work of Bernhardt, Terry and Duse, it was clearly something that took them beyond the immediate and into wider, deeper areas of themselves. This special quality is forever inaccessible to us now, since it died with them and with the time in which they lived. It is also something that challenges historical analysis, just as it challenged description by those contemporaries who struggled to express the inexpressible in the restricting language of their reviews and articles. (Stokes et al., 1988, p 11).
So to conclude, I would like to imagine them when they played roles that to me are special. I shall do this in the order of performance. First would be Ellen Terry as Beatrice in the early 1880s. It must have been marvelous to watch her spar with Henry Irving in Much Ado About Nothing.
And then I would have found myself enthralled by the performance of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in the 1890s. She thought of Hamlet much as I do: as a man who is determined to do the right thing, who hesitates not from a weakness of will, but because he needs to be certain before he acts. This is completely different from the idea that Hamlet was someone who just could not make up his mind.
And finally, I would have been transfixed by Eleonora Duse as Hedda Gabler in the first few years of the 20th Century.
References
Begley, A. (2017). The great Nadar: the man behind the camera. Tim Duggan Books (Penguin).
Gottlieb, R. (2010). Sarah: the life of Sarah Bernhardt. Yale University
Holroyd, M. (2008). A strange eventful history: the dramatic lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their remarkable families. Chatto & Windus.
Howard, R. (2004). Inner voices: selected poems, 1963-2003. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Huret, J. (1899). Sarah Bernhardt. Chapman & Hall.
Izard, F. (1915). Heroines of the modern stage. Sturgis & Walton.
Rader, P. (2018). Playing to the gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the rivalry that changed acting forever. Simon & Schuster.
Stokes, J., Booth, M. R., & Bassnett, S. (1988). Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: the actress in her time. Cambridge University Press.
Symons, A. (1926). Eleonora Duse. Elkin Matthews.
Teasdale, S. (1907). Sonnets to Duse and other poems. Poet Lore Company.
Weaver, W. (1984). Duse, a biography. Thames & Hudson.
Werner, J. (1980). Lady, wilt thou love me? Eighteen love poems for Ellen Terry attributed to George Bernard Shaw. Stein and Day.