Madame Céleste. Engraving by D.J. Pound after J. Norris.

Madame Céleste (ca. 1810-1882) was a French dancer, actress and mime artist. She performed in the United Kingdom and the United States, and was one time manager of the Adelphi Theatre in London. "Madame Céleste's highly successful career as a dancer and melodramatic performer (a success equalled in the United States only by Fanny Kemble and Jenny Lind) defied both language and national boundaries. ... Her brilliance as a mime artist inspired those dramatists who created parts for her to explore the complex emotions of outcast figures such as Narramattah or Cynthia, divided from family and estranged from their ethnic pasts. In the dances incorporated into her roles, whether as a wild Arab boy or as an Eastern Gypsy, she tempered the fashionable sophistication of French ballet with a wild and exotic primitivism. Her characters dramatized in disturbing ways the conflicting politics and values of European and 'native' cultures. ... Madame Céleste's theatrical identities crossed the boundaries of both gender and ethnicity. Her mute characters, who expressed their ambivalent and sometimes tormented thoughts and emotions in the silent language of the body, accompanied by music, were significant for their theatrical insights into the inarticulate borders of rationality." (Jane Moody, Céleste, Céline (1810/11–1882)', Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, 2004)