Word: tussaud
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...internet search engines are a spookily accurate digital barometer of contemporary celebrity - in 2007, Google's Top Ten Search terms included Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton; Gordon Brown didn't feature - Tussaud's is a clunkier analog version of the same thing. It conducts its own polling among its patrons (most visitors come from Britain, Germany, India and the U.S.) and also conducts wider market research to decide exactly which prominent people, living or dead, should be immortalized in a kind of tallow known as "Japan wax". Popularity among the patrons was what won Bollywood star Salman...
...human qualities. Until this week, that is. On Tuesday, in a startling reversal of its public relations strategy, Downing Street rushed to quash rumors that Brown might be less of a dummy than his predecessor, the consummate orator Tony Blair. A rash of media reports had claimed that Madame Tussaud's, the famous London waxworks exhibition with offshoots in the U.S., continental Europe and China, had delayed commissioning a figure of Brown pending the outcome of the parliamentary election he must hold by June 2010. Blair's waxwork, meanwhile, remains on show, sharing a podium with President Bush. Stung...
...confusion? In February, Tussaud's PR Manager Ben Lovett had told reporters that, in line with standard procedures, a Brown waxwork wouldn't be commissioned until after elections. (Brown inherited the job between elections, after Blair resigned.) A subsequent "significant swell of public support" for Brown triggered the request to Downing Street, says Lovett. That's a rare mismatch between Tussaud's own soundings and the wider world view, because opinion polls reflect no such swell - Labour, under Brown, has actually lost ground to the Tories...
...moved frequently in search of lower rents; and his father, a civil servant and illustrator, was an alcoholic who had to be institutionalized. Yet the early letters are surprisingly upbeat, concerned mainly with food, clothes, allowances and schoolwork. At 14 came his first unforgettable visit to London, including Madame Tussaud's, where he was "delighted with the room of Horrors, and the images of the murderers...
...years, of the oldest subject--Madame Tussaud, who did her self-portrait...