Madame tussaud who is she

Her mother, who was a widow, was the housekeeper of famous anatomist and waxmaker, Philippe Curtius. He taught Marie all there was to know about the art of wax sculpture. She sculpted perfect waxworks of many notable figures of the time, including Francois Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. Rumor has it that shortly after the onset of the French Revolution, Marie began creating plaster casts and death masks of beheaded victims of public executions, many of whom she knew personally.

Some were even her own friends is it just me, or is this getting a little strange? This had noise and lights and you felt you were standing on the gun deck of HMS Victory and there - you could almost see him breathing his last - was the bloody, pale body of Horatio Nelson. But the greatest waxwork in Madame Tussauds is of Tussaud herself.

A very small old woman, with a large nose and chin, dressed in suitably chilling Victorian bombazine, stands guard over the rest of the wax populace. She feels made up, she seems like a story.

Between those dates she met, and often modelled from life, the most famous personages in history. Tussaud was trained by a Swiss master of wax anatomy, Philippe Curtius. The real men had been banished, so the protesters felt their waxy simulacra had to bear punishment.

The mob was shot at, marking the first real bloodletting of the Revolution, an event that stoked the storming of the Bastille two days later. Soon Tussaud was casting guillotined heads; even without their bodies, they were still the personalities of the time. She was called to take a cast of the rapidly decomposing body of Jean-Paul Marat, just after he was stabbed in the bath by Charlotte Corday.

In her version of Marat, the sick and ugly visage is very different to the terrifying propaganda painting by Jacques-Louis David. The waxworks became a very dangerous place, as it was illegal to have busts and figures of people no longer deemed acceptable.

Towards the height of the Terror, Tussaud was arrested and imprisoned. When she was released, to cast the guillotined head of Robespierre, the Revolution was over. When Curtius died a few years later in , he left her everything, but now she was on her own. Hoping to strengthen her position, she married a hapless engineer called Tussaud, who nearly sank her whole business.

As France became fixated on a single man — Napoleon — Tussaud left Paris and her husband to bring some history to England so we could see it. The exhibition continued to grow as Madame Tussaud added to her collection models of English murderers and body snatchers. In Punch Magazine called it a "Chamber of horrors". In , her grandsons moved the exhibition to its current site on Marylebone Road.

It was largely destroyed by fire, and rebuilt in the s, and today it features models of sports personalities, musicians and film stars, statesmen from around the world and even the Royal Family. Madame Marie Tussaud. A year after her release in , Marie married Frances Tussaud.