Victorien Sardou

Victorien Sardou wrote more than seventy plays and was among the most commercially successful French dramatists of his day. A master of the well-made play (plots engineered like clockwork around a star performer), he had his greatest successes with Fédora, Madame Sans-Gêne and La Tosca. La Tosca opened in 1887, built for Sarah Bernhardt, who toured it across Europe and America; Puccini saw it and pursued the rights for years. Shaw, reviewing the type, coined the word Sardoodledom for it. He was elected to the Académie française, and outlived his own reputation by some distance.