Madame Tussauds

Madame Tussauds is a wax museum in the City of Westminster, London, founded in 1835 by the French wax sculptor Marie Tussaud. It stands as one of London's longest-running tourist attractions, having drawn visitors continuously since the Victorian era. The museum displays lifelike wax figures of famous and historical figures alongside popular film and television characters, and has grown from a single London site into a global brand with locations across four continents.

Marie Tussaud was born Marie Grosholtz in 1761 in Strasbourg, France. She learned wax modelling from Philippe Curtius, a physician and modeller in Bern, Switzerland, who took her to Paris in 1767. She created her first wax sculpture, of Voltaire, in 1777, and during the French Revolution made death masks of prominent victims. After inheriting Curtius's collection upon his death in 1794, she married François Tussaud in 1795 and toured Britain and Ireland with her exhibition. Unable to return to France because of the Napoleonic Wars, she settled in London and in 1835 opened her museum in the upper floor of the Baker Street Bazaar, with her sons as partners. She directed the museum until her death on 16 April 1850.

The museum's early success was built partly on the Chamber of Horrors, which appeared in advertising as early as 1843 and displayed figures of murderers and victims of the French Revolution. By 1883, restricted space at Baker Street prompted Tussaud's grandson Joseph Randall to commission a new building on Marylebone Road. The new galleries opened on 14 July 1884. Madame Tussaud & Sons was incorporated as a private limited company in 1889.

Disaster struck on 18 March 1925 when an electrical short caused a fire that destroyed many portrait figures, though most moulds were saved and figures could be recast. The museum reopened in 1928 with added cinema facilities. During the Second World War, the Blitz damaged around 5,000 head-cast moulds and destroyed the adjacent cinema, but the museum was rebuilt again.

Global expansion began in 1970 with the opening of the Amsterdam branch. The Tussauds Group was acquired by Merlin Entertainments in May 2007 for approximately one billion pounds, adding Madame Tussauds to a portfolio that included Alton Towers and Legoland. In 2019, Merlin Entertainments itself was acquired for about six billion pounds by a consortium led by Kirkbi, the investment company of the Lego founders' family, together with Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, taking the company private with Kirkbi holding a 50 percent strategic majority stake.

The museum's collection consists of life-size wax replicas of historical figures and contemporary personalities, including athletes, actors, musicians, politicians, models, and scientists. The scope has expanded considerably from its nineteenth-century origins. While early displays focused on national heroes such as Horatio Nelson and Sir Walter Scott alongside the notorious figures of the Chamber of Horrors, the modern collection encompasses popular film and television characters portrayed by famous actors. Some sculptures made by Marie Tussaud herself still survive, including a self-portrait from 1842 that remains on display at the museum entrance. The oldest figure on display is Madame du Barry, modelled by Curtius in 1765. Other early faces include Robespierre and George III.

The signature attraction from the museum's earliest years was the Chamber of Horrors, which presented in two parts the victims of the French Revolution and notorious murderers. This section became so identified with the museum that Charles Dickens hailed Madame Tussaud's in 1860 as "something more than an exhibition, it is an institution." A waxwork of Dickens himself appeared at the museum in 1873, three years after his death.

The historical waxworks include Marie Tussaud's 1842 self-portrait at the entrance, the 1765 figure of Madame du Barry by Curtius, and faces from Tussaud's own hand such as Robespierre and George III. Many of the oldest models were lost in the 1925 fire and 1941 Blitz damage, but because the original casts survived, the historical figures could be remade and are now shown in the museum's history exhibit.

The original museum occupied the upper floor of the Baker Street Bazaar from 1835, with a permanent home established there in 1836. This site later became notable through its connection to the Druce-Portland case trials of 1898 to 1907. In 1883, Joseph Randall conspirators commissioned the construction of a purpose-built museum on Marylebone Road to address the cramped conditions at Baker Street. The new exhibition galleries opened on 14 July 1884 and have remained the London museum's location ever since. The building eventually incorporated the former London Planetarium in its west wing, opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1958, though the planetarium ceased sky projections in 2006.

Madame Tussauds London is located on Marylebone Road in the City of Westminster. It is operated by Merlin Entertainments and remains a major tourist attractions in London, accessible to the general public as a commercial museum. The website for the London location is https://www.madametussauds.com/london/.

Since the 1970 expansion to Amsterdam, Madame Tussauds has grown to multiple locations across four continents. As of 2023, active sites include London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Blackpool, Budapest, Istanbul, Prague, and Vienna in Europe; Sydney in Australia; Las Vegas, New York, Nashville, San Francisco, Hollywood, Washington D.C., and Orlando in the United States; Shanghai, Hong Kong, Wuhan, Beijing, and Chongqing in China; and single locations in New Delhi, Bangkok, Tokyo, Dubai, and Singapore.