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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Emma Beddington

The extraordinary life of Josephine Baker, looked back on in 1986

The Nazis protested about her ‘degenerate’ performance outside a Berlin theatre: Josephine Baker.
The Nazis protested about her ‘degenerate’ performance outside a Berlin theatre: Josephine Baker. Photograph: The Hammond Collection 1927

On her arrival in Paris in 1925, Josephine Baker was ‘just a featured dancer with a knack for comedy’, the Observer explained in an evocative photo essay on the singer, dancer and superstar in 1986. It was the 19-year-old’s first experience of unsegregated society and, casting off her childhood in the St Louis slums, (where she witnessed ‘the worst race riots and massacres the United States had known’) she fell in love with the city.

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