Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker (1906-1975), American-born French dancer and singer whose fame reflected the Parisian passion for African American music and dance in the 1920s. Born Josephine Freda MacDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, she took, and kept, the name Baker from her second husband, William Baker. Josephine Baker first gained notice for her exuberant dancing as a chorus member in the all-black musical revue Shuffle Along (1921) in New York City. During the early 1920s Baker also made regular appearances at the Cotton Club, the Plantation Club, and other New York nightclubs, performing the Charleston, the black bottom, and other dances created by blacks. Her onstage clowning—crossing her eyes and contorting her limbs—in Shuffle Along and the show Chocolate Dandies (1924) revealed her comic talents and her exaggerated, but fluid, movements. In 1925 she went to Paris and won enormous fame starring in an American production, La revue Nègre.

Thereafter, Baker remained in Paris, with occasional returns to the United States. She was hailed in Paris as a liberated, exotic character, and she built on this reputation with performances of suggestive dances in scanty costumes at the Folies Bergère. In one jungle dance she wore only a skirt of bananas. She starred in several motion pictures, including La Sirène des tropiques (1927; The Siren of the Tropics), and had a recording career. Her signature song, “J’ai deux amours” (I Have Two Loves), referred to her love for two countries, the United States and France. During an era of French fascination with African and African American culture, Baker introduced European audiences to dances originated by blacks. Her flamboyant and elegant costumes influenced French fashion, and some of her outfits, especially her banana skirt, became legendary. She often paraded in public with a leopard called Chiquita.

In 1936 Baker returned to the New York stage for a role in the Ziegfeld Follies, which was not well received. She toured internationally, but French audiences proved the most loyal, and she became a French citizen in 1937, after marrying her third husband, Jean Lion, a French businessman.

Baker also served in the French Resistance during World War II (1939-1945), using her position as an entertainer to mask the fact that she was passing on intelligence information. She was rewarded with the French Légion d’honneur (Legion of Honor) and the Médaille de la Résistance. In the 1960s Baker participated in the civil rights movement in the United States. She announced her retirement in 1956 and spent much of her time afterward with an orphanage she had established in the Dordogne region of France, although often obliged to perform again for financial reasons. She died on April 12, 1975, and after a state funeral in Paris was buried in Monaco.