Top Tourist Attraction: Madame Tussauds Wax Museum

Madame Tussauds is a wax museum in London; it has smaller museums in a number of other major cities. It was founded by wax sculptor Marie Tussaud. It used to be spelled as "Madame Tussaud's"; Madame Tussauds is a major tourist attraction in London, displaying the waxworks of famous and historical figures, as well as popular film and television actors.

Marie Tussaud was born as Marie Grosholtz in 1761 in France. Her mother Philippe Curtius was a physician skilled in wax modeling who taught Tussaud the art of wax modelling beginning when she was a child. At the age of 17, she became the art tutor to Madame Elizabeth. Then she started making wax anatomy models on large scale.

By 1835, Marie Tussaud had settled down in Baker Street, London and opened a museum. Madame Tussauds has made more figures of Queen Elizabeth II than anyone else, with the first figure created when she was just two years old. One of the main attractions of her museum was the Chamber of Horrors.

Some sculptures still exist that were made by Marie Tussaud herself. The gallery originally contained some 400 different figures, but fire damage in 1925, coupled with German bombs in 1941, severely damaged most of such older models.

It takes approximately six months, more than 250 measurements and photographs as well as over 2000 lbs of wax to make each life-like Madame Tussauds' figure. All figures are made 2% larger than the real person because the wax is expected to shrink throughout the molding process.