Lia Félix

Origins and early life

Lia Félix, born Adélaïde Félix at Saumur on 6 July 1830, was the fifth of the six children of Jacob Félix and Esther Thérèse Hayer, the Jewish pedlars from Alsace and Bavaria who criss-crossed France selling cloth and whose children became, one after another, the leading actors of their age; her elder sister was Rachel, the tragedienne who restored the French classical repertory to the stage. The route by which she appears in this directory is that of her parents, documented, and shared with a sister already listed here.

Work and career

Unlike Rachel, Rébecca and Dinah she was never a sociétaire of the Comédie-Française, and made her reputation the hard way, by work and by playing everywhere she could in Paris. She took part in Rachel's American tour, and had her greatest success as the Joan of Arc of Jules Barbier's play at the Théâtre de la Gaîté, a part written for a Jewish actress to speak the words of a Catholic saint before a Paris that was not always kind about such things.

Her last stage appearance was in Victorien Sardou's La Haine in 1874. She died in the eighth arrondissement of Paris on 16 January 1908 and is buried at Père-Lachaise, in the same tomb as her sister Rachel.