Sandrine Kiberlain’s performance as Sarah Bernhardt is returning to French television. TF1 Séries Films has scheduled Guillaume Nicloux’s The Divine Sarah Bernhardt for Monday 26 October 2026 at 9.10pm. First released in French cinemas on 18 December 2024, the film gives Kiberlain room to explore the laughter behind the theatrical legend.
The story of that performance begins with a change of mind. Before playing Bernhardt, Kiberlain associated her with an old-fashioned manner of declaiming dramatic verse. Preparing the film brought a different woman into view, someone whose activities and appetites reached beyond the stage. In an interview with Télérama at the time of release, she described the pleasure of discovering that breadth. The task became less about approaching a revered name and more about finding a character she could play.
An actress with room to change register
Kiberlain came to the part with a career across drama and comedy. After training at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique in Paris, she attracted attention in Éric Rochant’s The Patriots in 1994. She won the César for most promising actress in 1996 for Laetitia Masson’s En avoir (ou pas). Theatre brought another award: a Molière for theatrical revelation in 1997 for Le Roman de Lulu. Working with a text, and finding its movement in performance, had long been part of her craft.
Her best actress César followed in 2014 for Albert Dupontel’s 9 Month Stretch. Nominations for Mademoiselle Chambon, Number One Fan and In Safe Hands belong to other parts of that filmography. Bernhardt offers space for different registers within a single role: a public performer’s authority sits beside a lover’s uncertainty. The film’s portrait of her relationships gives those shifts somewhere to happen. Solemnity alone would leave little room for the actress who enjoyed commanding an audience.
A portrait with declared inventions
Despite its biographical subject, the film does not attempt to recount an entire life. Screenwriter Nathalie Leuthreau explains in the press notes that she chose two periods, the tribute paid to Bernhardt in 1896 and the year 1915. She also makes the boundaries of the project explicit: this is a portrait drawn from Bernhardt’s life, with imagined elements. The passionate relationship with Lucien Guitry, played by Laurent Lafitte, includes deliberate invention. Its intimate scenes should therefore be understood as drama, rather than a record of private events.
The American distributor likewise describes an episodic film instead of a conventional chronological biography. Parisian theatres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide the setting for a story in which work and emotional attachments meet. Alongside Lafitte, Amira Casar plays Louise Abbéma. These relationships keep other people in the frame: even a celebrity accustomed to drawing attention must contend with those who answer back, withdraw or remain close. That is a more workable dramatic starting point than an uninterrupted procession of achievements.
Finding presence without reproducing a voice
Speaking on France Inter in December 2024, Kiberlain said she had listened to recordings of Bernhardt after making the film, rather than using them as a model beforehand. Reproducing an earlier style of speech was not her route into the character. She spoke instead about Bernhardt’s sculpture and drawing, and her business activities. Those interests helped widen the picture beyond the familiar image of a tragedienne delivering verse. There was a working artist to consider, with concerns that continued when the curtain came down.
Clothes offered another practical way into the part. In her interview with Nathalie Chifflet, Kiberlain discussed the high collars created by costume designer Anaïs Romand and the bearing they gave her. A garment can change how an actor holds her head before a line has been spoken. The film received two nominations at the 2025 César Awards, for Romand’s costumes and Olivier Radot’s production design. Neither nomination resulted in a win, but both identify the material world supporting the performance.
The laughter inside the legend
When the film opened, Catherine Balle’s interview in Le Parisien singled out Kiberlain’s sudden, unrestrained laughter. In Le Monde, critic Murielle Joudet praised the lightness of her performance and considered the encounter between an actress and a myth’s clothes. These responses help explain the favourable attention the role received. The attraction was not confined to period splendour. It lay in the movement Kiberlain brought to a figure who might otherwise have remained fixed in theatrical history.
The forthcoming broadcast returns that performance to its proper context: a fiction directed by Guillaume Nicloux and written by Nathalie Leuthreau, not a new cinema release. The film runs for 98 minutes. TF1 Séries Films lists audio description and accessibility provision for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers for its Monday 26 October screening at 9.10pm. That is the next scheduled opportunity in France to meet this cinematic version of Sarah.
© Photo: TF1 Pro
