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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

26. She Became World Famous

Baker thrived in the integrated Paris of the 1920s. After La Revue Negre ran its course, she starred in La Folie du Jour, in which she continued to wow audiences with jaw dropping performances. Before long, Josephine Baker came to rival Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson as the world’s most photographed woman. By 1927, within two years of her arrival in France, Baker was Europe’s highest paid entertainer, male or female. In the early 1930s, she starred in a pair of movies, and moved her family from St. Louis, to come and live with her in her French estate.

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.