Olga Celeste (April 9, 1888 – August 31, 1969) trained leopards and pumas for performance in circuses, vaudeville and film.

[4] Per a 2020 Swedish-language profile of Olga Celeste, "As a 16-year-old, she had left her parents' home outside Lund in Skåne, at night, to take the Amerikabåt and make her dreams come true.

[6] She took the ship SS Cretic from Liverpool to Boston, arriving April 30; her contact in the U.S. was her sister Edith Knutson of Chicago.

[6][7][8][a] According to the never-authoritative Frank Buck, Princess Celeste ran away at age 14 or 15 to join a circus operating in Chicago's Riverside Park.

Big Otto's operation was acquired by film producer William Selig and she continued on as a "lion tamer" for that outfit.

Frequently dressed to resemble her leopards, Olga serves as an access point to another world if only because her animals have turned her into something 'other' even outside the realm of fiction.

[22] When Zoopark shut down in 1940 she was the last original employee of what had once been Selig's Wild Animal Farm, and she borrowed money (including, reportedly, from friends like boxer Jack Dempsey and Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller)[5] to buy five leopards and three lions that she did not want sold to strangers.

[2] She died in 1969 and was buried on September 8 in the same grave as life partner[5] Emma Bell Clifford at Evergreen Park Memorial Cemetery.