La Belle Otero

One of her more famous costumes featured her voluptuous bosom partially covered with glued-on precious gems, and the twin cupolas of the Carlton Hotel built in 1912 in Cannes are popularly said to have been modeled upon her breasts.

[3] In August 1898, in St-Petersburg, the French film operator Félix Mesguich (an employee of the Lumière company) shot a one-minute reel of Otero performing the famous "Valse Brillante."

The screening of the film at the Aquarium music-hall provoked such a scandal (because an officer of the Tsar's army appeared in this frivolous scene) that Mesguich was expelled from Russia.

[3] She had accumulated a massive fortune over the years, about US$25 million, but she gambled much of it away over the remainder of her lifetime, enjoying a lavish lifestyle, and visiting the casinos of Monte Carlo often.

She lived out her life in a pronounced state of poverty until she died of a heart attack in 1965 in her one-room apartment at the Hotel Novelty in Nice, France.

Statue of La Belle Otero by Camilo Rodríguez Vidal, in Valga, Spain
Otero appears with Liane de Pougy and Cléo de Merode in a fashionable crowd in the Bois de Boulogne drawn by Guth , 1897