Paris exhibit celebrates 'first celebrity' Sarah Bernhardt

• The 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-publicizing and using the press to brand her image. A century later, a French museum opened an exhibit on the eccentric, scandalous and multihyphenate performer known as “La Divine,” whom many consider the world’s first celebrity. At the Petit Palais museum in Paris, the public is now discovering the madcap jigsaw puzzle of Gothic stories, costumes, recordings, films, photos, jewels, sculptures, and personal objects for the first time together–-- that made Bernhardt an object of fascination from Berlin to London and New York.