This was the era of the salon, when ambitious women like the Marquise de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry played host to philosophers and poets, their homes hubs of thought and art. The grande dame came into her own with the Enlightenment, a woman freed from the restrictions of an older world and given, if not power, a chance for influence. One salient difference, of course, is the age we live in. "People always referred to my grandmother as a grande dame, so I always understood it as a compliment-someone who was admired and respected, someone to learn from." "Things are different now, but I like to think that the term still conjures intelligence and strength," says Tepper Madover, 43, one of Broadway's youngest powerhouses. The grande dame, a figure of undisguised power, was invented in a world of rigid power structures that have since become fluid or no longer exist. Arielle Tepper Madover, the chair of the Public Theater and the Tony-winning producer of such plays as The Cripple of Inishmaan (starring Daniel Radcliffe) and the upcoming Les Liaisons Dangereuses, isn't one. Indeed, many women who might have once aspired to or claimed the title of grande dame view the term warily. Indeed, one of her hallmarks is a cultivated stateliness that often doesn't mesh with modernity-leaving us with the question: Has the grande dame ascended to the throne just as she ceased to be relevant? Yet girls are no longer sent to convents or forced to rely for influence on their ability to bear children. As a result, giddiness and apprehension have always marked her arrival on the main stage, whether personified by Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Roosevelt, Catherine the Great, or Lady Macbeth. The archetypal grande dame-mature, larger-than-life, and, crucially, self-made-cultivates power consciously and uses it, operating without the constraints on a younger woman. She cut herself off from any damaging intimacy and uses the only tools she has: her sexual prowess and her brain."įrom that perspective it's an especially interesting moment to mount Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a play that deals explicitly with the question of powerful women in a man's world, at a point when a woman has become the prime minister of Great Britain and, for the first time in history, the presidential candidate of a major U.S. Therein is the source of her vulnerability. "Girls are sent to convents at 13 and taken out to marry a man of their parents' choosing. "The Marquise comes from a world where women are thrown away, with no power other than their ability to bear children," says McTeer, who spent the summer in New York warming up for the role by playing Petruchio in an all-female production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The Marquise comes from a world where women are thrown away, with no power other than their ability to bear children. This fall, in one of the most eagerly anticipated Broadway revivals in years, the role of the Marquise-a showcase for actors from Jeanne Moreau to Glenn Close to Annette Bening-will be reprised by Janet McTeer, one of England's greatest living stage performers (though she is largely unknown to American audiences). Whether a shameless celebration of libertinism or, as later claimed, a denunciation of pre-revolutionary decadence, the novel laid bare the excesses of the ancien régime never before or since have characters schemed with such Mephistophelian relish, destroying lives and savaging reputations with a calculating froideur that has influenced fiction and theater ever since. When Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published it was a scandalous sensation, relished and gossiped over by Marie-Antoinette and the court of Versailles. "Win or die." The villainess-heroine of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel famously does both, manipulating and seducing her way through one of the most iconic tragedies in the Western canon-and in the process giving us the image of the ultimate grande dame. I've distilled everything to one single principle," declares the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.