American actress and writer Adah Isaacs Menken was BOTD (probably) in 1835. Accounts of her early life are unclear, but she appears to have been born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a family of European, African and Cuban origin. She showed an early interest in dance, performing at the French Opera House in New Orleans and in Havana. She moved to Texas in her teens to pursue an acting career, and was briefly married in 1855. She married her second husband, the musician Alexander Menken, in 1856, moving to Cincinnati, Ohio where she became better known as an actress. After leaving Menken, she moved to New York in 1859, making her Broadway debut in the play The French Spy. Her performance was trashed by critics, who described her as “the worst actress on Broadway” and “delightfully unhampered by the shackles of talent”, and she was condemned in the tabloid press for her bigamous third marriage to prize-fighter John C. Heenan. She developed a more successful second career as a poet and journalist, befriending poet Walt Whitman, whose work she described as “centuries ahead of his contemporaries”. In 1860, she had an affair with acrobat Charles Blondin, joining him in a vaudeville tour across the United States. She became an international celebrity in 1861 with the play Mazeppa, an equestrian burlesque based on a poem by Lord Byron, in which she rode across stage wearing only a body stocking. The sight of an apparently nude actress onstage caused a scandal, but created a box-office success. Menken performed the show over several years in New York, San Francisco, London and Paris, becoming the highest-paid actress of her generation. She became infamous for her androgynous appearance, daringly short-cut hair and indiscreet affairs with Alexandre Dumas père, Algernon Charles Swinburne and (possibly) George Sand. She died in 1868 aged 33. Her poetry collection Infelicia was published days after her death, and was again trashed by critics, though admired by fellow poets Christina Rossetti and Joaquin Miller.