Mata Hari was an exotic dancer and courtesan, killed by the French for espionage during WWI. Was she really a spy? Margaretha Geertruida 'Margreet' Zelle MacLeod (7 August 1876 – 15 October 1917), better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a member of the Frisian minority from the Netherlands, and was an exotic dancer and courtesan. Media in category 'Mata Hari' The following 40 files are in this category, out of 40 total. Mata Hari (2. 01. IMDb. Medieval knight Lord Gregoire, who has been betrayed by his own advisor and warriors for an abundance of gold and riches, vows that after these traitors revel in ten life- times of excess, he will have his bloody revenge. Notably, she wears the same dress as in the photo above.“I took the train to Paris without money and without clothes. There, as a last resort and thanks to my female charms, I was able to survive.”—Margu. Louise Weber, Jane Avril and Liane de Pougy had made it famous, and become famed, for the high- kicking, knicker- flashing can- can at the Moulin Rouge and Folies Berg. In those high times a scandalous lifestyle was not to be hidden but shown off, a cause cel. While powerful men in waistcoats and top hats openly flaunted their mistresses on the Champs Elys. A skilled horsewoman, she applied for work as a riding instructor and then, growing more desperate and reportedly flirting with whoring, as trick rider with the Circus Molier, whose owner instead introduced her as a dancer to the salons of one of Paris’ upper- class doyennes. In those days of no radio, no television, no cinema, these high- society salonni. In Europe all things Oriental were then the rage, as was a new naturalism in dance. American Isadora Duncan had become famous for going so far as to appear barefoot in a leg- baring toga. Knowing her skill was not in her movement, but in her sex appeal, she used one to cover up the other. She harkened back to her days in the Indies, capitalized on her status as the wife of an officer (billing herself as his widow), and gained entry into the circles of the upper class, to which she would otherwise have been barred. Her strategy was simple; her routine, billed as a sacred invocation to Siva, Hindu god of destruction, combined raw eroticism with a veneer of religiosity. She appeared in a costume of her own design—diaphanous veils and metallic brassi. When a respected reviewer wrote breathlessly in a society magazine, “Lady Mac. Leod is Venus,” her career was made. Her audience numbered in the hundreds, including high- ranking men of state. Click photos to enlarge. By the next morning the Paris papers were all agog over the new star in the firmament. The Gallic called her performance “far from the entrechats of our classic dancers.” The Press said she “dances with her muscles, with her entire body, thus surpassing ordinary methods.” Parisian Life described her act more succinctly: “She wears the costume of the bayad. Her backstory changed every time she told it, variously as the daughter of a Hindu priest with a white woman or Scottish lord’s indiscretion with a Malay temptress who died in childbirth, leaving her to be raised as a temple dancer and bring the secrets of the mysterious Orient to the salons of upper- class Europe. Mata Hari, byname of Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, n. 7, 1876, Leeuwarden, Neth.—died Oct. 15, 1917, Vincennes, near Paris, France) dancer and courtesan whose name has become a synonym for the seductive. The latest Tweets from Mata Hari (@MataHaritoo). International relations consultant. Dedicated to helping all people lead healthy, productive lives. With Aleksey Guskov, Viktoriya Isakova, Vahina Giocante, Rutger Hauer. The incredible true story of an extraordinary woman. Mata Hari is an epic drama that charts the extraordinary life of. Directed by David Carradine. With Calista Carradine, David Carradine, Paul Hunt, Nikolai van der Heyde. This film is about the life of the (in)famous Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, better known as Mata Hari. Mata Hari was a dancer and mistress who later became a spy for France. Accused of being a double agent, she was executed in France in 1916. Learn more at Biography.com. Mata Hari had made the leap from erotic dancer to artiste. She acquired the management services of Gabriel Astruc, famed for bringing the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo to France. He booked her into Paris’s top music hall, the Olympia, for 1. She made private appearances in the salons of fanancier Baron Henri de Rothschild and chocolatier Gaston du Menier, and took them both as lovers. People came to see me because I was the first who dared to show myself naked to the public.” —Mata Hari. Her husband sued for divorce, using her seminude photos as evidence of bad character. Her father, who had sent her away as girl when his own finances failed, cashed in on her fame by approving a tell- all book. Ten years later her pain still came out in her interrogation transcript: “.. My father married this woman. Two writers went to my father, and asked if he would give his name, and she wrote the book, and my father gave my photographs. I have been very unhappy through this horrible book. She wrote this book, and my father gave the name, and one day 6. All Paris thinking I was twenty- eight years, and this said I was seventy- six or something like that.. All the people bought it. It was the great unhappiness of my life.”Sigmund Freud was only just then establishing his theory of the libido, but today it seems plain that Margaretha sought father figures in an effort to recapture her childhood, as the object of an older, powerful man’s affection, and she had learned the hard way that sex was her lure. Pretending to consider my dances very artistic and full of character, thus praising my art, they came to see nudity, and that is still the case.” —Mata Hari. Critics. Natalie Barney. The expatriot American “amazon” invited Mata Hari to dance at her lesbian garden parties, once as Lady Godiva on a white horse. She lived dangerously.”Colette. One of Barney’s lovers, the French novelist said of Mata Hari, “She did not actually dance, but with graceful movements shed her clothes. She arrived fairly naked at her recitals, danced . Zambelli said, “She is as much an Indian dancer as I am a Chinese waiter! I have only lost my temper about two hundred times in my career, a royal tribute to my overweening forebearance, but this time I was sorely tempted.”Lover of fashion. Berlin, 1. 90. 7At the Od. Ermine goes with everything. Monte Carlo, 1. 91. Same dress as above and below. After her last performance as a dancer in the Netherlands. March 1. 91. 5In Amsterdam in 1. Germans to spy on the French. Lover of men. The Great War. German infantry, Second Battle of Ypres, 2. April – 2. 5 May 1. Note spike- topped Pickelhauben helmets, phased out in 1. From its very inception with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, the violence of World War I was not limited to men. The Germans in occupied Belgium imprisoned British nurse Edith Cavell for treason, after she helped wounded British and French soldiers and Belgian and French civilians of military age to reach neutral Holland. She was tried in military court, condemned, and shot on 1. October 1. 91. 5. In death she became a more potent weapon for the Allies than she ever was in life, a propaganda tool that encouraged more men to enlist than she aided to escape. German Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Alfred Zimmermann, said, “It is undoubtedly a terrible thing that the woman has been executed; but consider what would happen to a State, particularly in war, if it left crimes aimed at the safety of its armies to go unpunished because committed by women.” The lesson would not be lost on the French. One love. Possibly the one real love of Mata Hari’s life was Captain Vladimir de Massloff of the Special Imperial Russian Regiment, stationed on the Western Front. A son of Russian aristocracy, he was just 2. Part of the reason she agreed to spy, she told her interrogators, was to make “enough money that I never have to deceive Vadime de Massloff with other men.” He is shown here in a photo that may have been taken by Mata Hari herself, and with her in Paris, 1. German poison gas. After the war he married, returned to Russia, and vanished in the maelstrom of the Revolution. I have loved them all my life. I prefer to be the mistress of a poor officer than of a rich banker. It is my greatest pleasure to sleep with them without having to think of money. And, moreover, I like to make comparisons between the different nationalities.”—Mata Hari. Evicted from Germany, Mata Hari is known to have spent the first year or so of the war in neutral Holland, in a home furnished to her by her latest lover, the Belgian Col. Eduard Willem Baron van der Capellen. The British maintained she spent the time being trained as “Agent AF 4. Antwerp, run by the notorious “Red Tiger,” Fr. She soon moved up to intelligence collection, which led in turn to imparting her knowledge to future German spies. Her reputation for ruthless discipline gained her infamy, though her identity was a secret until long after the end of the war. Mata Hari never mentioned knowing or ever having met Schragm. After the war the latter admitted Mata Hari was a German spy, but maintained she never divulged any worthwhile information. Nemeses. Spy game. In January 1. 91. Kalle radioed Berlin that he was working with a spy, code- named H- 2. A French listening station atop the Eiffel Tower intercepted the message, which was in a code previously broken by English cryptographers in Room 4. Admiralty Ripley building In Whitehall, just down the hall from the office of First Sea Lord Sir John Jellicoe. When the Germans let slip that payment was to be sent to Mata Hari’s maid, by name, at her Netherlands address, the identity of H- 2. It was all the evidence the French needed to arrest her. It has been claimed that the Germans knew the code was broken, and used it anyway to lure the French into a double- bind: they would either arrest their own agent as a traitor, or continue to use her, allowing Berlin to peddle false information to Paris. In retrospect it seems doubtful the Germans knew the code was cracked, as just two weeks later they used the same cryptography to send the Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico, which provoked the United States into the war—an outcome they surely wished to avoid. February 3rd, 1. 91. Prisoner. The Prison Saint- Lazare, in the north of Paris. The Bastille of its day, the Prison Saint- Lazare had been converted from a leprosarium at the time of the Reign of Terror in 1. In the the early nineteenth century it became a women’s prison, dirty and unheated. After a first night’s stay in a padded cell on suicide watch, Mata Hari, who had lived so luxuriously in her day, lived in isolation in the ward known as “La M. She was reduced to eating nothing but soup and bread, with fifteen minutes of exercise a day and meat once a week. Her only companions were the nuns of the order of Marie- Joseph who attended the prisoners. Her lawyer, the inffectual Edouard Clunet (an ex- lover) protested the conditions to no avail. Pierre Bouchardon made frequent visits to grill her over and over. For over five months Mata Hari clung to her story that she had been a spy for France, not against it. Appeals from the Dutch government came to nothing. She was still maintaining her innocence when brought to trial on July 2. In 1. 93. 5 Saint- Lazare was largely demolished. Only the infirmary and chapel remain, listed as historic monuments since November 2. Soupir, France, in May 1.
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