Grande Dame Sarah Bernhardt
[1844-1923]
The author visits the Calgary Foot Care Nurses
At some point some time back I noticed a trend where Baby Boomers online were regularly bemoaning how young people today don’t know who the Beatles were or scoff openly at the notion that the Beatles could be of any lingering significance or value. Oh, I laugh too. Do any of you raving Beatlemania outpatients remember who Sarah Bernhardt was? Not one of you does…except for the guy who thinks I’m talking about sassy comedienne Sandra Bernhard. No, Sarah Bernhardt was the most famous actor or actress on planet earth in the period directly before cinema. She died, in point of fact, before the cinema could grow up enough to do anything meaningful with her. Today, our imagination’s portrait of her could only ever be hazy and scant of resource.
Tallulah Bankhead, the sophisticated and frank Broadway legend revered the world over by gay men who dig theatre and gossip, in some ways followed in the path of grande dame Sarah Bernhardt, almost entirely eschewing appearance in motion pictures in order to continue mining the great yawning ineffable from up from under stage lights before a rapt live audience. Tallulah’s best movie is popularly believed to be Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime pressure-cooker Lifeboat (1944) in which it can indeed be observed that the great stage actress knows how to have the right wry sort of fun with unambiguously silly make-believe in a way that the camera itself cannot help but assiduously enjoy. That is the main difference between cinema and theatre: in the cinema you are playing the whole thing to one audience member and the audience member in question happens to be filming you.
Geraldine Page was likewise the biggest and most highly touted actress in all mythological New York City once upon a fabled time, but the movies rarely seemed up to doing us much help in remembering her from the remote and occluded hilltop of the transglobal global present. (The Internet was the Tower of Babel all along.) Do yourself a favour if you’ve never seen the film and swallow your pride and check out Woody Allen’s uncharacteristically heavy 1978 Chekhov/Bergman mashup Interiors in which Page gives as ruthless, festering, darkly humorous, and aggressively exposed a performance as any ever before captured on celluloid. The only performance that truly makes it as performance is the performance that achieves true insanity, argues the boisterously lounging Mick Jagger in Performance (1970). Well, okay, if that’s what you’re after, you Theatre of Cruelty geeks, I would advise you to take a look at and very seriously consider Geraldine Page. I believe this gig just might be her living destiny.
Part of what is not only noteworthy but outright historic about the unique celebrity of Charlie Chaplin, the cherubic itinerant tramp with the toothbrush moustache and mesmerizing balletic feats, was that his was the first mechanically reproduced face to be seen by and to have become recognizable to people from everywhere in the world you could take a projector. In a sense, if you really take the requisite time to consider it, Charlie Chaplin is much more like one interchangeable bottle of Coca-Cola or another than you or I will ever be.
Tallulah Bankhead on the set of Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944)
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