Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage actress who starred in some of the more popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo, Fédora and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou, and L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. She also played male roles, including Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture", and Hugo praised her "golden voice". She made several theatrical tours around the world, and she was one of the early prominent actresses to make sound recordings and to act in motion pictures.
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques (1894), was adapted to the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks.
Napoleon II was the disputed Emperor of the French for a few weeks in 1815. He was the son of Emperor Napoleon I and Empress Marie Louise, daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria. Napoleon II had been Prince Imperial of France and King of Rome since birth. After the fall of his father, he lived the rest of his life in Vienna and was known in the Austrian court as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt for his adult life. He was posthumously given the nickname L'Aiglon after the popular Edmond Rostand play, L'Aiglon.
Arthur Honegger was a Swiss composer who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. A member of Les Six, his best known work is probably Antigone, composed between 1924 and 1927 to the French libretto by Jean Cocteau based on the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles. It premiered on 28 December 1927 at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie with sets designed by Pablo Picasso and costumes by Coco Chanel. However, his most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which was inspired by the sound of a steam locomotive.
Benoît-Constant Coquelin, known as Coquelin aîné, was a French actor, "one of the greatest theatrical figures of the age."
Travesti is a theatrical character in an opera, play, or ballet performed by a performer of the opposite sex.
The Théâtre de la Ville is one of the two theatres built in the 19th century by Baron Haussmann at Place du Châtelet, Paris, the other being the Théâtre du Châtelet. It is located at 2, place du Châtelet in the 4th arrondissement.
The name Théâtre de la Renaissance has been used successively for three distinct Parisian theatre companies. The first two companies, which were short-lived enterprises in the 19th century, used the Salle Ventadour, now an office building on the Rue Méhul in the 2nd arrondissement.
Winifred Ashton CBE, better known by the pseudonym Clemence Dane, was an English novelist and playwright.
The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin is a venerable theatre and opera house at 18, Boulevard Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.
L'Aiglon is an opera in five acts composed by Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert. Honegger composed acts 2, 3, and 4, with Ibert composing acts 1 and 5. A 2016 reviewer described it as "a singular piece of work" with its "blend of operetta, divertissement, conversation piece, historical pageant and, in the disturbingly powerful fourth act set on the Napoleonic battlefield at Wagram, phantasmagoria peopled with living figures onstage and dead voices off".
Chantecler is a verse play in four acts written by Edmond Rostand. The play is notable in that all the characters are farmyard animals including the main protagonist, a chanticleer, or rooster. The play centers on the theme of idealism and spiritual sincerity, as contrasted with cynicism and artificiality. Much of the play satirizes modernist artistic doctrines from Rostand's romanticist perspective.
Il pleut, il pleut, bergère is a French song taken from the opéra comique in one act Laure et Pétrarque, written in 1780 by Fabre d'Églantine. The music was written by Louis-Victor Simon.
Oswald Yorke(néeOswald Parkinson Harker; 24 November 1866 – 25 January 1943) was a British character actor who had a near sixty-year career performing on both sides of the Atlantic.
Henri Philippe Moïse Monteux was a French theatre and film actor, and an elder brother of the conductor Pierre Monteux. His family was descended from Sephardic Jews who settled in France.
René Fauchois was a French dramatist, librettist and actor. Stagestruck from his youth, he moved from his native Rouen to Paris as a teenager to pursue a stage career. He had early success both as an actor and as a playwright. Among those with whom he collaborated as his career flourished were Sarah Bernhardt and Sacha Guitry. His career lasted for more than sixty years, and his output was prolific.
The Duke of Reichstadt is a 1931 French-German historical drama film directed by Viktor Tourjansky and starring Walter Edthofer, Lien Deyers and Grete Natzler. It is the German-language version of the French film The Eaglet, based on the play L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand. It takes its name from the formal Austrian title of Napoleon II, its central character.
The Eaglet (French:L'aiglon) is a 1913 French silent historical film directed by Emile Chautard. It is an adaptation of the play L'Aiglon by Edmond Rostand, which portrays the life of Napoleon II.
This is a list of the notable roles played by the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, including both stage roles and early motion pictures, with the year of the first performance. This list does not include one-time performances or revivals. Roles first performed by Bernhardt are noted as premieres.
