Victorians judged fame by one test: were you in wax at Tussaud's?
In Victorian London, a satirist joked that nobody counted as truly popular until Madame Tussaud had cast them in wax. Charles Dickens called her museum an institution. It began with a Strasbourg-born sculptor who modelled Voltaire at 16, spent three decades touring and finally settled in Baker Street.
Marie Grosholtz, born in 1761, learned wax modelling as a child from Philippe Curtius, a physician her mother worked for in Bern, and followed him to Paris. Her first figure, of Voltaire, came in 1777, and according to her memoirs she later tutored King Louis XVI's sister in art. She was jailed for three months during the Revolution and released. When Curtius died in 1794 she inherited his collection, married François Tussaud the next year and renamed the touring show after herself.
In 1802 she brought her waxworks to London's Lyceum Theatre to appear alongside Paul Philidor's phantasmagoria, then struck out alone, complaining that he neglected her. War with Napoleon kept her from going home, so she toured Britain and Ireland for years before opening a museum in Baker Street by 1835. She coined the name Chamber of Horrors herself, using it in advertisements from 1843, and visitors also came for Nelson, Wellington and Queen Victoria. She made a self-portrait in 1842 that still greets guests, and died in her sleep on 16 April 1850.
Her grandson Joseph Randall moved the collection to larger premises on Marylebone Road, which opened on 14 July 1884. Fire in 1925 and Blitz bombing in 1941 wrecked most of the old figures, but the surviving moulds allowed many to be recast. The oldest piece shown today, Madame du Barry, was made by Curtius in 1765.
The first foreign branch opened in Amsterdam in 1970. Ownership passed through Pearson, then Dubai International Capital for £800 million in 2005, then Blackstone, which folded it into Merlin Entertainments. Branches now span four continents, and celebrities occasionally pose as their own figures; in 2009 weatherman Al Roker spent two hours startling visitors in New York.
Source: Madame Tussauds
