Sealed in wax

Marie Tussaud’s waxwork museum has given rise to a billion dollar global franchise. What’s the secret of its success?

by Hephzibah Anderson / December 14, 2011 / Leave a comment

Published in January 2012 issue of Prospect Magazine

Alfred Hitchcock (Madame Tussauds London)

© Artur Andrzej

Madame Tussauds is like a safari, only it’s celebrity you’re stalking, and about halfway through you begin to feel more hunted than hunter. You are, after all, the only thing moving, unless you count the eyes that flick mechanically back and forth on the French revolutionary waxwork. And the revolutionary is hidden many, many famous faces away—past Brangelina, past Harry and Wills, past JFK and MLK—in a far-off “zone” devoted to the place’s own history.

But it is precisely the institution’s history that has brought me here. On 1st December, to little fanfare, Madame Tussauds passed a milestone: the 250th birthday of its founder and namesake. Born Marie Grosholtz in 1761, she learned the art of waxworks from Philippe Curtius, a Swiss doctor, and went on to found an institution that has become a museum empire, its outposts strung across the world from Amsterdam to Washington DC and Shanghai to (of course) Las Vegas.

Marie Tussaud made her name during the tumultuous years before and after the French revolution. A quarter of a millennium on, the institution she founded may yet be scuppered by another populist cultural force, this time one she helped to create: the idea that celebrity status is within the grasp of us all. If celebrity can be had by everyone, why splash out more than £20 to get close to a waxen imitation?

A trip to London’s legendary house of wax used to begin with the queue that snakes around its copper-topped home. Now, you can pre-book online and step fast-track into a lift to be swept directly up to the “A-list” zone.

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Comments

Ramesh Raghuvanshi
December 24, 2011 at 08:34
Every one want immorality.This urge arises from fear of death.Death erases our existences.To keep our existences lives by some artificial way man write autobiography,hire some one to write his biography.Some try to erect their statue.Different way man struggle to make him immortal. Everyone know this illusion but without illusion how can we survive in the world?Everyman know this is a laughable struggle till man try his best to be immortal.Madam Tussaud know the weakness of mankind so she opened sealed wax museum of statues
Doug
December 24, 2011 at 19:42
Gee, Ramesh, what wisdom from the East!
Charles Frith
December 26, 2011 at 03:22
21st century Homo Materia's obsession with celebrity is to fill the gap between the painted reality the commercial world posits and the cubicle office life that reality supplies to pay for the illusionary one. The bar for celebrity falls but a waxwork is static and thus the people can see and feel what it is like to look like a celebrity in three dimensions up close and then substitute their own body into the mix and soon nobody can tell the pigs from the people and the people from the pigs.