Marie Tussaud, original name Marie Grosholtz (1761-1850), French-born founder of Madame Tussaud’s museum of wax figures, in central London.
Her early life was spent first in Bern and then in Paris, where she learned the art of wax modeling from Philippe Curtius, whose two celebrated wax museums she inherited upon his death in 1794. From 1780 until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, she served as art tutor at Versailles to Louis XVI’s sister, Madame Élisabeth, and she was later imprisoned as a royalist. According to her memoirs, during the Reign of Terror she had the gruesome responsibility of making death masks from heads—frequently those of her friends—freshly severed by the guillotine.
