I am travelling on business, and my internet connection is cutting in and out — so my Friday post will be delayed till tomorrow when I get back home. Apologies for the delay.

Eleanora Duse was a contemporary of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and the English actress Ellen Terry. One of the three great actresses of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. She was famous for her naturalism, a kind of Meryl Streep of her day. She did the plays of her day—Shakespeare, plays based on Zola’s writings, melodramas. One critic describes her transcendent acting and how it lifted a traditional melodrama. In moment of extreme emotion, the convention of the day was that the heroine crossed her arms across her chest and lifted her eye to the heavens.

In the scene where the husband (that cad) abandons his young wife and child, the critic described how the actress stood with the boy playing her son pressed against her skirts and when the husband delivers the news, she reaches down and gently crossed the boy’s arms against his chest. There was apparently not a dry eye in the house. Read More »