Paula Maxa

Paula Maxa, also known mononymously as Maxa and born Marie-Thérèse Beau (died 1970), was a French actress of stage and screen best known for her tenure as lead actress at the Grand Guignol. Much of her life is only known due to her memoir, which was published in a tabloid and is known to have been dramatized. She has been known as the "most murdered woman in the world". In an article for CrimeReads, April Snellings called her the "original scream queen". Maxa is the subject of the fictionalized biography The Most Assassinated Woman in the World, as well as other media.

Biography Crime editor April Snellings, writing for CrimeReads, said that Maxa was born in 1898, while linguist Agnès Pierron, who wrote a book on Maxa, said in Monstrum that she was born in 1892. However, it is agreed that she was born and raised in the Montmartre district of Paris, France. She wrote that "all my following roles I had to shriek in terror, wade in blood, disembowel people, and descend to the profoundest depths of madness". including, according to one account, a leper's kiss and a two-minute decay process, the latter of which she went through more than two hundred times. According to Pierron, this "range of horrors" was "unique in theatrical history". She was dubbed the "most murdered woman in the world". However, she stated "The realness of the theater is more powerful. Again, there is no comparison."

According to her autobiography, her personal life was as dramatic as her career, and included lurid tales of prominent, well-behaved men becoming criminals out of love for her. In particular, she recounted the story of a businessman named Maurice who upon falling in love with her, turned his apartment into a "death chapel", and was convicted for a financial crime. She sold her jewelry to hire a lawyer to defend him, then became enamored with the lawyer. When Maurice was eventually released from prison, he attempted to kill her. According to that story, the lawyer had done his best to stall the case, and Maurice's new counsel easily freed him. Her memoir and autobiography both confirm that she frequently faced stalkers and death threats. She is also the subject of the dramatized biography movie The Most Assassinated Woman in the World, which was released in 2018, and the subject of a short story by Carmen Maria Machado. She appears in the 2019 book Anaïs Nin in the Grand Guignol by Robert Levy. A fictionalized musical about her, Maxa, the Maddest Woman in the World, was premiered by the University of Minnesota in 2021. She was included in horror historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas's book, 1000 Women in Horror.