Émilie Lerou

Émilie Lerou (10 April 1855 – 10 February 1935) was a French stage actress and writer who was nominated for the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature. Since 1880, she played at the Comédie-Française Théâtre, and then at the Odéon-Théâtre in Paris.

In 1908, she published a memoir entitled Sous le masque: Une vie au théâtre ("Under the Mask: Life in the Theater") which earned recognitions in literary circles. Over the next few decades, until shortly before her death, Lerou repeatedly changed and added to the text; a new edition of the work was published in 1935. She fictionalizes her life, with a young girl from Russia as the protagonist. The American novelist and medievalist Urban Tigner Holmes Jr. reviewed the book in 1937 as "an intimate picture of the French theater world as it existed before the Great War." He described the work as "lively and insightful" and recommended it as supplementary reading for college courses on modern theater.

The Nobel Committee described her novel as "a weave of thaumaturgical, spiritualistic and homeopathic fantasies, mixed together and sprinkled with a small dose of Hindu theosophy" and "in terms of its ideological content, the work is a product of empty imagination."