In 1977, actor and director David Carradine embarked on an ambitious yet unfinished project. His idea was to film an actress from her youth onward, allowing the story to grow with her, in order to tell the tragic epic of Mata Hari, the famous dancer and secret agent. The role ...
Jet-black eyes, olive skin. On August 7, 1876, in the Netherlands, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born – and in those features, so different from the other local girls, already lurked the shadow of a presage. At eighteen, she answered a matrimonial request: a Dutch colonial officer stationed in Java. She married him, followed him there, and learned the local dances, appropriating exotic costumes and rituals. But the marriage was a disaster, and once back in Paris she reinvented herself – first as a horsewoman, then as an “Oriental” dancer.
A cascade of veils, jeweled breasts, sumptuous headdresses: thus was Mata Hari born, able to bewitch officers, diplomats, lawyers, and wealthy men of all ages. One of them would conquer her heart: for him, she gave up her freedom, agreeing to become an informant for the French government. The rest of the story remains hidden between trial records and legend, and no one will ever know whether Margaretha was truly a spy or merely a scapegoat.
What is certain is that, under the weight of eight charges, on the morning of October 15, 1917, she walked steadily toward the rifles – the inscrutable face of a woman who did not surrender to the justice of men but to that, more enduring, of history
