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40 Fascinating Facts About the Fabulous Josephine Baker

Khalid Elhassan July 2, 2019 24 min

Josephine Baker - Josephine Baker - Chanter L'amour

28. She Swept Celebrities Off Their Feet

In taking Paris by storm, Josephine Baker also captured the hearts of the modernist art movement’s leaders, who congregated in the City of Light. Pablo Picasso jumped at the chance to paint her, seeking to capture her alluring beauty, and saying that she had “legs of paradise”. Ernest Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw“. French director Jean Cocteau also set out to make her a movie star, although her film success was limited to silent films in Europe.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.