Divine Sarah
Set in 1906 California, Divine Sarah depicts the controversial fin-de-siècle actress, Sarah Bernhardt, not as a firebrand but as a weary diva struggling with both art and advancing age. Driven out of Los Angeles by the threat of protests by the League of Decency, Sarah is sent by her overprotective manager to Venice Beach where he has rescheduled their latest production. Hounded by reporters, and forced to comply with the ambitious theater manager’s demands, Sarah at sixty-one years of age seriously contemplates quitting the business altogether. She lolls in baths and resists the demands of her profession, all the while fantasizing about a quiet French country life. Her devoted manager ignores Sarah’s angst; he recognizes the predictable patterns of her pre-performance malaise. Events soon reveal that for all her “Hamlet-ing,” Sarah is a slave to public adoration and the potent joys of artistic transformation. Fifteen years later, she’s still strutting the boards. This is not the usual depiction of the divine Sarah, but Adam Braver has drawn an imaginative profile of the artist’s powerful, and temperamental, personality.
