Why We Should Care: If you’ve ever entertained yourself by peeling wax off a candle during your family’s Sunday dinner, you can appreciate how genius it was that Marie Tussaud crafted a career out of playing with wax. While her legacy has drifted into deliciously tacky territory, in her day Tussaud hobknobbed with some seriously classy folk. Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire and Robespierre were amongst her models. She also saved her neck from the guillotine by taking on the gruesome task of creating death masks of freshly executed corpses, including Robespierre and Marie Antoinette.

For Her Biopic We’d Cast: Demi Moore. She proved her molding prowess in Ghost.

Two Traits We Admire:
1) She worked her way up from housekeeper to world renowned wax artist.
2) Her first permanent exhibition space was on Baker Street. Clearly she must have been besties with Sherlock Holmes, which is nothing short of amazing.

What Highschool Textbooks Didn’t Say: Madam Tussaud’s in London now has a wax figure of the stars of Big Brother Season Nine. Textbooks don’t mention this because it is a useless, useless piece of information.

Style best described as: School marmish conservative with a hint of macabre.

How she’s celebrated: With museums in every lush stronghold – Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Berlin – her ghost is presumably living it up hardcore.