WARNING for descriptions of violence and gore and brief mentions of sex, rape, and suicide
Scream queens typically appear on the big screen, famously Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween franchise) and Marilyn Burns (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), but the woman who most credibly lays claim to the title of the original earned her fame on the stage. Paula Maxa became known as ‘the most assassinated woman in the world’, and not for nought — she was ‘killed’ over 10,000 times in at least sixty different ways. Beyond the stage, her real life proves difficult to construct, but if Maxa herself is to be believed, it was just as dark as her career…
Before we get into it though, it should be noted that Maxa probably isn’t too trustworthy, particularly with her life after becoming a star. Most of the details she provided about her life came from a memoir entitled I Am the Maddest Woman in the World, which first appeared in the less-than-credible men’s magazine True. Tales of scandalous love affairs and dramatic twists that seem to belong in a soap opera would have almost certainly been exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated. Unfortunately, they’re also pretty much the only things we have to go on.
However, her earlier years are comparatively easy to trace. She was born in 1898 in Paris and grew up in the Montmartre district, home to the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir. Her family were well-off and she had a very happy childhood, which (stepping now into memoir territory) came to an abrupt and tragic halt when she was fifteen. Maxa wrote that her seventeen-year-old boyfriend took her into the woods, then worked himself up into such a lust that he assaulted her and slashed her throat. When Maxa woke up in the hospital, she asked for him not to be punished, only to learn that he’d killed himself after the crime.
“Blood lust followed me as a curse,” Maxa wrote. “…The men who were drawn to me followed a tragic course. They became insane, killed in lust and killed themselves.”
According to her memoir, she married a French count when she was sixteen, but became bored with married life and left her husband to take up acting. She soon found herself in the Grand Guignol, which was becoming infamous for its bloody, perverse productions. People — including names such as Anaïs Nin, Princess (later Queen) Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and Ho Chi Minh — went to the theatre for more than a show; they wanted to feel something.
Indeed, sometimes this desire to ‘feel’ turned from abstract into physical — there were special boxes available to rent for audience members who tended to become aroused during the performances. Said audience members sometimes had to be told to ‘keep it down’.
Aside from that, the Grand Guignol was known for its special effects, which were sometimes so realistic that they caused people to faint in fright. Maxa was fascinated by the plays put on at the theatre, though her first appearance as an actress was on screen in a crime serial film called Les Vampires. She had just a few minutes of screentime in the over ten-hour film, but her performance was so good that she caught the attention of Camille Choisy, a former actor and the newest director of the Grand Guignol.
He hired her as an understudy in Laboratory of Hallucinations; the actress then fell ill, and so began Maxa’s career as the first scream queen.
“In all my following roles I had to shriek in torture, wade in blood, disembowel people and descend to the profoundest depths of madness,” she writes, and this one is no exaggeration.
As previously mentioned, Maxa died onstage a staggering number of times in ways that might turn even the strongest of stomachs. To illustrate, she was:
- Stabbed
- Poisoned
- Strangled
- Steamrolled
- Stung by scorpions
- Eaten by pumas
- Diced into 83 pieces
And that is not even the half of it. The theatre’s effects were so good that they even managed to make it appear like Maxa’s ‘body’ was decomposing onstage, which was so popular that it was repeated in 200 performances.
A horrifying addition to the list of grisly fates that met Maxa’s characters onstage was at least 3000 rapes. Maxa was performing at a time when French women were completely barred from the vote, and it is interesting to consider the social implications of a society that was happy to sexualise and brutalise women in the theatre, while just outside the French Senate were blocking suffrage bills and women were fighting for their emancipation.
Perhaps it’s nothing to be read into, but there is another short quote from Maxa’s memoir that sticks out as being of interest: “From the beginning I was given roles of victimised women.”
Maxa’s career at the Grand Guignol ended in 1930 when she was allegedly forced out by Choisy’s successor, Jack Jouvin. She claimed that he was afraid her popularity — which was at staggering heights — would overshadow his, though there is another theory that her throat had been destroyed by all the screaming she’d had to do over her thirteen years at the theatre.
Later in life, she founded her own theatre called Le Théâtre du Vice et de la Vertu, but it was short-lived; she then briefly returned to the Grand Guignol before it’s closure, but she would never again be the ‘Princess of Blood’ she was at the peak of her fame.
She died in 1970 from cancer at the age of 71.
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