Betrayed by her family and challenging society, Jane Barnell (5 photos)

A man's beard adorns him. You can't argue with this line from a simple song. What about a woman? Is she doomed to suffering, ridicule, and the fate of the bearded lady to become an outcast and a laughing stock or to scrape her cheeks and chin with a razor several times a day and apply a thick layer of makeup?





But no. And this lady clearly proved this fact by her example.



Jane with her second husband

Jane Barnell was born in 1871 in North Carolina. Her father was a traveling carriage maker of Jewish descent, and her mother was half Catawba Indian and half Irish.

At birth, the baby's chin and cheeks were covered with down, and by the age of two she already had a real beard. Her superstitious mother considered her daughter cursed and bewitched. When Jane was four years old and her father was away on business, she sold the child to a traveling circus called the Great Eastern Family Circus and Menagerie.

The circus traveled to Europe, where in 1876 Jane contracted typhoid fever and was expected to die. “Kind” colleagues abandoned the girl to her fate. But Jane turned out to be strong and recovered. She was found by her father and brought back home, where she grew up on her Indian grandmother's farm. She received an education, learned to shave with a razor, and at the age of seventeen got a job as a nurse at the Wilmington City Hospital.



Still from the movie "Freaks"

An unpleasant incident in the hospital forced Jane to return to the farm, where in the spring of 1892 she met William Heckler, who owned a farm not far from her grandmother's.

Heckler helped Jane get a job at the John Robinson Circus, where she stayed for fourteen years. The girl married a musician from a circus orchestra.

The couple had two children, but unfortunately both died in infancy. Jane's first husband also died. After leaving Robinson's circus, the artist with an unusual appearance moved to the Forepaugh-Sells brothers' circus. She married an aeronaut. The profession implied a high risk, and a year later the husband died.



Her third marriage was unhappy: her husband was an alcoholic. But after the divorce, Jane met her fourth husband, former clown Thomas O'Boyle. Barnell and O'Boyle met while working together on the show and married in 1931.

Barnell performed in various companies using various stage names, including Princess Olga, Madame Olga and Lady Olga Roderick. In 1938, she stopped touring and began working at the Hubert Museum in Times Square in New York.



She gained wide fame thanks to her role as a bearded lady in Todd Browning's film Freaks in 1932. Barnell later said that she hated the film and considered it "an insult to all the freaks."

A bright woman who survived the betrayal of her loved ones and managed to become happy in her own way died on July 21, 1945.