Gypsy Rose Lee

Gypsy Rose Lee (born January 8?, 1911, Seattle, Washington, U.S.—died April 26, 1970, Los Angeles, California) was an American striptease artist, a witty and sophisticated entertainer who was one of the first burlesque artists to imbue a striptease with grace and style.

Lee was born in January 1911 in Seattle, according to researchers who have identified her birth certificate. She celebrated January 9 as her birthday, though her birth certificate uses January 8, and she also said she had been born in 1914, which was widely reported at her death and appears on her gravestone.

Lee’s stage-mother manager, Madam Rose, put her daughters Rose (Gypsy) and June on stage at lodge benefits. Later, without her mother, Lee became the star of Madam Rose’s Dancing Daughters. She made her debut in burlesque in Kansas City in 1929. Within two years she was the headliner at Billy Minsky’s Republic Theater on Broadway.

In 1936 Lee appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies. When New York’s burlesque houses were closed the following year, she went to Hollywood to appear in a series of motion pictures. She starred in The Streets of Paris at the New York World’s Fair (1940), was featured in the musical play Star and Garter (1942), and appeared in nightclubs and on television.

Lee published an autobiography, Gypsy (1957), which was the basis for the musical play (1959) and motion picture (1962) of that name.