Sarah Bernhardt, La Divine | The ups and downs of a diva

More than a decade after lending her features to Simone de Beauvoir in Violettefrom Martin Provost, Sandrine Kiberlain slips into the shoes of the first international star in Sarah Bernhardt, la divinefrom Guillaume Nicloux. The press spoke with the actress in Paris.

Posted at 7:00 a.m.

In Sarah Bernhardt, la divinedirector Guillaume Nicloux (The little one) and screenwriter Nathalie Leuthreau (with whom he wrote Holiday) tell two episodes in the life of the great actress that Victor Hugo nicknamed “La Voix d’Or”. To embody this role, which she accepted as soon as reading the script, Sandrine Kiberlain, met at the Rendez-vrance meetings in January, did not try to imitate this famous voice of which there are some recordings. No more than his laughter.

“When I played Sarah, at some point a laugh was released. Guillaume asked me where it came out and I replied that I did not know. The voice is the same. We discovered it on the set. I just told myself that she is not the same at 50 as 70 years. I had to find something. It was done with the distributed she has, the rhythm she has, the body she has, with her leg less or not. Guillaume recovered from it. He said to me: “It’s you, you are going to invent, we are going to create this Sarah together”, says the actress, who has read several biographies of Sarah Bernhardt, whose Unbreakable laughter by Françoise Sagan.

Guillaume Nicloux’s film took us first in 1916, when Sarah Bernhardt, 72, is about to have a leg amputate. Dead his son Maurice Bernhardt (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), the painter Louise Abbéma (Amira Casar), her best friend and mistress, and her devoted secretary Georges Pitou (Laurent Stocier). Also visited him the young playwright and filmmaker Sacha Guitry (Arthur Mazet), in cold with his father, actor Lucien Guitry (Laurent Lafitte). The flamboyant actress then tells her about the reasons for her own break with Lucien, the great love of her life.

“It is a woman who was not loved by her mother, who was mistreated. There is something that she will drag all her life. I even believe that the scope of her notoriety, of all that she sought to have, with all the love she wanted to have each other, comes from her childhood injury. »»

“Fifteen people in one”

The film then dates back in 1896, while we are preparing to celebrate the “Day of Sarah Bernhardt”. Among the literary tops evolving around the famous actress are Émile Zola (Arthur Igual), whom she convinces to look at the Dreyfuss affair, and Edmond Rostand (Sylvain Creuzevault), who will write for her Aiglon A few years later. To her great dismay, the diva, 52 years old, discovers that Lucien, divorced from the mother of little Sacha (Théodore Le Blanc), wishes to marry the young actress Charlotte Lysès (Mathilde Ollivier).

“I have often played measured, modest, reserved, very worthy women. Sarah sometimes loses her dignity to want to say what she thinks, to want to love a man who no longer loves her. He is a very important character in my journey, because very different and very rich. She was fifteen people in one. She was so impressive, so committed, so mysterious, so authoritarian, funny, sad. There was such a panel of emotions that it was necessary to let go even more with it than with other characters. »»

“A funny thing, this job”

One of the most remarkable replicas of Sarah Bernhardt, la divine is the one the actress launched to those around her before entering the scene: “Leave me, I have to leave myself. A replica that Sandrine Kiberlain finds “brilliant” because she sums up the job of actor.

“We really leave each other when we play. It is not difficult to leave me because my pleasure is to play a character, but it is also a pain to leave a character, to know that we will not play it anymore. In the scene where I see Lucien with my rival and that I say to him: “See you later, Lucien!”, This is my last phrase in the shooting. When we see the film, it is nourished by the fact that I will not say anything anymore, as if I said: “Farewell, Sarah!” In the box afterwards, I was moved, happy to have played her, for being in his company for two months. She gave me this scope that I felt like I was shrinking. It’s a funny thing, this job, ”concludes Sandrine Kiberlain.

Indoors on April 25. The costs of this trip were paid by Unifrance, which had no right to look at the text.