Hanging out with Justin Bieber in London.
What if you could pose with a ton of celebrities for an afternoon? Would you? Of course you would! You’d probably Tweet about it and Facebook it and brag about it on whatever other form of media you fancy. What if all those celebrities were merely posers themselves? One afternoon in London, I got the chance to take pictures with David Beckham, Whoopi Goldberg, and Justin Bieber. The thing was, though, that all of these people weren’t real – they were wax.
Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London is one of the most popular tourist activities in London and rightly so. It’s incredible, as is its history. Madame Tussaud, whose birth-given name was Anna Maria, was born in France in 1761. When she was nine, she became an apprentice to Phillippe Curtis, and he trained her in the art of “model wax likeness.” At age 16, she created her first wax figure of Voltaire and also modeled the famous Benjamin Franklin.
Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London contains wax death masks of beheaded aristocrats, which included Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.
A year later, Anna Maria’s life drastically changed. She became an art tutor to King Louis XVI’s sister at the Palace of Versailles and participated in the protests before the attack at the Bastille. She was arrested during the Reign of Terror and even had her head shaved in preparation of her death by guillotine, but she was released by a family friend under the condition that she exhibit allegiance to the Revolution. She therefore started creating wax death masks of beheaded aristocrats, which included Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, which are still in the exhibit today. To do this, Anna Maria would search through corpses around the city, finding decapitated heads of executed citizens and making her models based off these heads, most of them victims of the fate that she had narrowly escaped. There is a monument to Madame Tussaud in the museum that reenacts her process of retrieving dead bodies as her models .
When her mentor Curtis died in 1794, Madame Tussaud inherited all of his wax models and began traveling around Europe, showing her figures for the next 33 years. In 1835, Madame Tussaud located her first permanent location for her wax models in Baker Street, London. She generously opened the museum for everyone, not just the wealthy class. She even gave the lower class a discounted price at certain times. Her most prominent attraction was her Chamber of Horrors, which is still on display today. It includes both victims and criminals of the French Revolution and many of her first-created beheaded aristocrats. When Madame Tussaud died in 1850, her grandsons inherited the museum and moved it to its current location on Marylebone Road in London.
Waxwork is a very precise form of art. One figurine takes four months to create. It uses more than 250 body measurements and pictures of the subject. Each strand of hair is real hair from human heads and is individually inserted into the head of each figure. This makes the figures look especially realistic and allows for realistic photographs.
My favorite part of the experience was how lifelike the characters looked, in how they were formed, placed, and situated bodily. I also liked the way that the museum is set up – it’s timeless. The beginning of the museum takes the viewer through a runway of stardom, red carpet style. There are flashing lights, celebrities, and lots of people. Each celebrity is placed with a very specific background – like Elvis on a stage, Michael Phelps hanging from the ceiling about to submerge into the pool, the Beatles on a couch with their instruments, etc. After this, the viewer is able to meet various world leaders – like President Obama and Nelson Mandela, the British Royalty – like Diana and Prince William, cultural figures – like Shakespeare and Einstein, sports stars – like Muhammad Ali, and finally fictional characters – like the Hulk and Wolverine. The entirety of the museum is interactive; there’s a small ride that is involved, and there’s even a haunted house that is included in the Chamber of Horrors. I felt like I was able to experience time travel and simultaneously, world travel.
The figures are also all to scale. The artists take great pride in making their creations as lifelike as possible. The models go through a rigorous process of measurements, photographs, pokings, and proddings. They are formed according to accurate height, clothing style, hair color, and of course body and face shape. They dress them according to their character or person, and the wax figures almost become the people they were created after.
It makes you wonder who gets qualified to become part of the museum. Is it their popularity, their dashing good looks, their impact on society, the money they put into the museum? Even I don’t know. What I do know is that Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum allows us common folk to have an afternoon of pretend. Fake encounters with celebrities we follow on Twitter, singers we admire, and writers we look up to.
Madame Tussaud’s is a place of history, majesty, and character. Renowned Charles Dickens stated:
“While Tussaud’s collection of figures remains,
Which from all ranks and ages due praises obtains.
Its merits elude all the force of the pen,
Gives beauty to women, true spirit to men.”
What words. I would say I agree that this museum deserves great praise. It allows characters to come alive in a way photographs cannot. It is a pure form of art that can be appropriately appreciated by millions of visitors every year. I’d encourage anyone to go and check this out. And if London is too far for you, she has locations in America too – Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York, and Washington, D.C. Do it – go meet some stars. And if you want to do some of your own research look at two of my favorites, which I used for this article: Kate Berridge’s Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax, and Pamela Pillbeam’s Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks.
