Leonid Krol read a book for us: “Sarah Bernard. My double life. The best book about the legendary French actress, written by herself.
This is a very candid book. It is hard to imagine that any modern megastar would dare to tell such hard-hitting things about himself. For example, about the scandals that she arranged in the boarding house, about fights, tantrums, insults and humiliations … Sarah Bernard from childhood absolutely did not care about everything and everyone. She acted on the spur of the moment and was extremely impulsive. Living with strangers, she jumped out the window, trying to catch up with her departing aunt. She suddenly and secretly fled to Spain, violating her obligations to the theater. She openly clashed with influential people on whom her career, and sometimes her life, depended.
A psychoanalyst might have noticed that the behavior of the heroine is an unconscious desire to win the attention and love of her mother, who is eluding her. (Sarah grew up in a broken family, and her parents were very ephemeral characters for her.) But I think that the basis of her eccentric actions is something else — a deep loneliness and a desperate desire to create the world around her. Although, of course, she competed with her mother in many ways. She was a kept woman, a very beautiful woman who successfully sold her whims to a narrow circle of male connoisseurs. Sarah sold her whims professionally — on the stage: she was a master of gesture and pause, masterfully mastered intonation, voice. She created a myth out of herself and around herself. Ultimately, Bernard became the director of her life. And yet, I do not think that she deliberately built her biography.
Many want to be themselves, but few dare to follow this quest to the end. She managed to do it. And it seems to me that her phenomenal success was based precisely on the combination of powerful energy, will and talent to embody beauty, to build beauty into a symbol.
While working on her memoirs, the actress was also looking for herself, struggling with emptiness, with the fact that it would disappear, just as theatrical gestures disappear in eternity. She showed again and again that she did not want to be molded according to the patterns of her environment. This is one of those amazing women who, having made themselves, in my opinion, made the whole twentieth century.