Robert Gottlieb, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, Yale University Press, 2010, hardback, 233 pp, £18.99, ISBN 9780300141276

Robert Gottlieb's thoroughly researched and elegantly written biography of the energetic, idiosyncratic, iconic actress and international celebrity, who slept in a coffin, travelled with lion cubs and wore a hat festooned with a stuffed bat, is the first English-language biography to appear in decades. Reputedly the most famous actress who ever lived, the trajectory of her life linked with key episodes in the history of the Third Republic. She turned her theatre into a working hospital during the Franco-Prussian War and later, even after the loss of her right leg through amputation in 1915, she performed under bombardment for soldiers in the First World War and promoted the Allied cause through her indefatigable American tours continuing to perform into her late seventies.

Gottlieb is profoundly sceptical about her self-dramatising and contradictory autobiographical accounts of her personal life history, pronouncing her ‘a relentless fabulist' when recounting the details of her life. He explains how both the precise date and Paris location of her illegitimate birth remain shrouded in mystery following the destruction of official records in the Communard rising of 1871. However, pride in her Jewish heritage made her a passionate Dreyfusard and Gottlieb reveals how the life of this ‘scandal-ridden daughter of a courtesan' was ultimately transformed into a French national heroine.