A visit to Madame Tussauds in London

Look at this family visiting the wax museum. What did they do? Who did they see?

And listen to these people and look who they are standing next to!
Who do you know?
What are they talking about?  social media ? social housing?  social problems?

Madame Tussauds  is a wax museum in London with branches in a number of major cities, like Las Vegas, New York, Hollywood, Sydney, Berlin, Amsterdam, Shangai, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

It was founded by wax sculptor Marie Tussaud and was formerly known as "Madame Tussaud's", but the apostrophe is no longer used.

 Madame Tussauds is a major tourist attraction in London, displaying waxworks of historical and royal figures, film stars, sports stars and infamous murderers.

visit the madametussauds.com website

History

Marie Tussaud, was born as Anna Maria Grosholtz (1761–1850) in Strasbourg, France. Her mother worked as a housekeeper for Dr. Philippe Curtius in Bern, Switzerland, who was a physician skilled in wax modelling. Curtius taught Tussaud the art of wax modelling.

Tussaud created her first wax figure, of Voltaire, in 1777. Other famous people she modelled at that time include Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin.

During the French Revolution she modelled many prominent victims. In her memoirs she claims that she would search through corpses to find the decapitated heads of executed citizens, from which she would make death masks. Her death masks were held up as revolutionary flags and paraded through the streets of Paris. When the doctor died in 1794, she inherited his vast collection of wax models and spent the next 33 years travelling around Europe.
She married François Tussaud in 1795 and called the show: Madame Tussaud's.
In 1802, she went to London to exhibit her work.
As a result of the Franco-British war, she was unable to return to France, so she travelled throughout Great Britain and Ireland exhibiting her collection.
By 1835 Marie had settled down in Baker Street, London, and opened a museum.

One of the main attractions of her museum was the Chamber of Horrors. This part of the exhibition included victims of the French Revolution and newly created figures of murderers and other criminals.