Madame Tussauds

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Madame Tussauds Museum & Planetarium in London
Madame Tussaud as a wax figure at work

Madame Tussauds is a museum in London . It is a wax museum with other branches around the world. Wax figures of historical figures and people from contemporary history , such as athletes , actors , musicians , politicians , models and scientists, are exhibited .

The enterprise

In addition to its wax figure cabinets, the Tussauds Group operates numerous other leisure facilities worldwide, including a. also the London Eye and the Heide Park Resort in Soltau . In 2007, the Merlin Entertainments Group acquired the majority of the company shares and pushed the expansion of the wax figure museums to other international locations.

history

Bond from Madame Tussaud's Ltd. dated September 15, 1949

Marie Grosholtz was the founder of the museum . She learned her trade at the age of 17 from her sponsor and uncle Philippe Curtius in Bern . From 1767 she lived in Paris , where she became the private tutor of a sister of King Louis XVI. has been. During the Revolution , she modeled numerous prominent victims for the Revolution Museum. The heads of those who were executed were put on display on lances ; they decompose quickly. That is why they were replaced by wax heads cast in death masks . When Marie's uncle died in 1794, she inherited his wax figure collection, to which she added wax figures she had made herself. With her traveling exhibition she traveled through Great Britain and Ireland for several years. In 1802 she exhibited her collection for the first time in London. In 1835, she and her sons opened their own museum for their exhibition in The Baker Street Bazaar on Baker Street ; she headed the wax museum until 1842. In 1884 her grandson Joseph Randall moved the exhibition to its current location on Marylebone Road .

On March 18, 1925, an electrical short circuit caused a fire. Many of the portraits were lost and important pieces from the Napoleonic era, such as B. the carriage and the deathbed of Napoleon. Most of the molds could be saved so that the figures could be refilled. There were also a lot of plaster figures in a storage room that were not damaged. In 1926, Madame Tussauds became a limited company . In 1928 the museum was reopened with a cinema added.

In the Battle of Britain during the Second World War , around 5,000 head molds were irreversibly damaged in an attack by the Luftwaffe and the adjacent cinema was destroyed.

Since then, Madame Tussauds has continuously worked on expanding the exhibition. Today the latest attractions are the time travel Spirit of London , which spans the history of the British capital from the time of Elizabeth I to the present, then Scream , the new horror cabinet, and the 4D film Marvel Super Heroes 4D . Some of the newer characters are Daniel Radcliffe , Justin Timberlake, and Kate Moss ; an Angela Merkel figure was erected in 2008.

More branches

In addition to expanding the main exhibition, Madame Tussauds has opened 23 additional branches around the world since 1970: the Amsterdam branch was opened in 1970. From 1999 Las Vegas (1999), New York (2000), Hong Kong (2000), Shanghai (2006) and Washington DC (2007) opened in quick succession. On July 5, 2008, the seventh Madame Tussauds branch outside of London with 75 wax exhibits was opened on Unter den Linden in Berlin. Shortly after the opening, the head of the Hitler wax figure, which cost around 200,000 euros, was cut off by a visitor. Before this exhibition, there were already wax figure cabinets in Berlin with Castan's Panoptikum (1869 to 1922) at the Stechbahn or in Friedrichstrasse and the Berlin Panoptikum (1972 to 1996) at the corner of Kurfürstendamm and Joachimstaler Strasse , but they were not part of the Madame Tussauds group belonged. In 2009 Madame Tussauds opened branches in Hollywood and in September 2010 in Bangkok. In March 2011 the tenth branch was opened in Blackpool and in April 2011 the eleventh branch in Vienna in the Prater . Since April 16, 2012 there has been another branch in Sydney, Australia. There are further branches in Tokyo (2013), Wuhan (2013), Beijing (2014), Prague (temporary exhibition, 2014) and San Francisco (2014), Orlando (2015), Singapore (2015), Istanbul (2016), Chongqing (2016) and Nashville (2017). The first Indian office was opened in Delhi.

Web links

Commons : Madame Tussauds  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

  • Helmut Stalder: Madame Tussaud. Doing business with brains. In: Helmut Stalder: Misunderstood visionaries. 24 Swiss life stories. Verlag NZZ Libro, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-03823-715-0 , pp. 59–63.

Individual evidence

  1. Alex Capus : Himmelsstürmer: Twelve Portraits , p. 11ff
  2. Solveig Grothe: Wait a minute: What's behind this picture? In: Spiegel Online . March 24, 2017. Retrieved June 9, 2018 .
  3. n24.de
  4. Hitler is in good hands with Madame Tussauds. In: weltonline.de , July 5, 2008
  5. Museum visitor tears off Hitler's head. In: NZZ Online , July 5, 2008
  6. Former Berlin wax museum moves to Mannheim ( Memento of the original from October 20, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Article dated August 14, 2012, accessed October 12, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.echo-online.de
  7. Former Berlin Panopticon, wax museum. In: Lexicon Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf from A to Z
  8. New branch opened in the Prater. In: Der Standard , March 31, 2011

Coordinates: 51 ° 31 ′ 22 ″  N , 0 ° 9 ′ 19 ″  W.