Paris exhibition celebrates ‘first celebrity’ Sarah Bernhardt

A marble bust of Sarah Bernhardt, by Jean-Leon Gerome, on show at the Petit Palais museum in Paris (Michel Euler/AP)

Pioneering French stage star Sarah Bernhardt was one of the world’s most famous women by the time of her death in 1923 – a status she owed not just to acting talent but her modern instinct for self-publicising and using the press to brand her image.

A century later, a museum in Paris has opened an exhibition on the eccentric, scandalous performer known as “La Divine”, whom many consider the world’s first celebrity.