Sam Bernard

Biography

Birmingham delivered Sam Bernard to the world on 5 June 1863, and from that moment the stage seems to have been his natural orbit. Audiences later roared at his comic timing in *Poor Schmaltz* (1915), then swooned over *Because He Loved Her* (1916) and gasped through the caper *The Great Pearl Tangle* (1916). Off-screen, two marriages—first to Florence Deutsch, later to Lizzie Reardon—wrote a private drama parallel to his public antics. The final curtain fell on 16 May 1927, somewhere on the restless Atlantic, when the actor took his last bow aboard a ship bound for nowhere but memory.