The French singer and actress Polaire was famous for her corseted waist, which at times reportedly measured as little as 14″ but which probably more often measured something nearer 16″. A gifted actress and a talented dancer, she became one of the most celebrated women of her day.
Born Emilie Marie Bouchaud in Algeria on 14 May 1874, she began her career as a café singer at 15. Within a couple of years she had joined her older brother in Paris, where she adopted the stage name Polaire. Working as a music-hall singer, she deliberately cultivated an exotic and erotic image predicated on her foreignness, her unusual looks and, above all, her tiny, tightly laced waist. Talk of her figure and her lavish overdressing in furs and dazzling jewels preceded her appearances wherever she went. Critics often mentioned her ’strangeness’ while the poet Jean Lorrain commented on her ‘great voracious mouth, the immense black eyes, ringed, bruised, discoloured, the incandescence of her pupils, the bewildered nocturnal hair, the phosphorus, the sulphur, the red pepper of that ghoulish, Salome-like face.’ In 1954 Cecil Beaton remembered ‘her huge mouth, evil slanting eyes and wild hair cut in a fringe.’ Certainly, by the standards of the day her facial features were considered unusually large and heavy but she forestalled and disarmed any criticism by dubbing herself ‘the ugliest woman in the world.’
From the halls, Polaire went on to act in the theatre. Her first major appearance was in 1902, at the Bouffes-Parisiens, as the eponymous heroine of Colette’s ‘Claudine a Paris’. In 1910 she made her first London appearance at the Palace Theatre in ‘Le Visiteur’, a one-act piece in which she played an actress who disarms a burglar in her boudoir by dancing for him. She ends by inviting the ruffian to join her in a ‘Danse des Faubourgs’, a variation of the grim and vicious ‘Apache’ dance then in vogue, before stabbing him with his own knife. A reviewer for ‘The Times’ asked ‘But do English audiences really like these decadent dances? That is the question to which only the audiences themselves can give a practical answer. And last night every seat in the theatre was sold.’
She constantly courted publicity and capitalized on her reputation for decadence. In 1911 ‘Priscilla in Paris’, a correspondent for ‘The Tatler,’ reported on Polaire’s arrival at one of the season’s more important events accompanied by ‘a youth who looked about sixteen. Such a baby boy! A little pink and white face, violet blue eyes and smooth flaxen poll…He seems to be the celebrated actress’s latest toy. She takes him everywhere with her…I think she carts him round because she has an artistic eye for contrasts, and certainly you cannot imagine anything more piquant than the extreme blondness of the youth next to Popo’s very swarthy little self.’ No doubt with contrasts still in mind, she later returned from an American tour with a black servant boy around whose neck she had hung a placard that read ‘I belong to Polaire. Please send me back to her.’
In 1911, as Pauline Polaire, she was cast in her first film role. She appeared in many more films, some of them talkies, but never abandoned the musical stage. She died in 1939, at the age of 65.

Photographed by Paul Boyer of Paris.

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