More than eighty years after her death in front of a firing squad, Mata Hari continues to provoke controversy, she has been described as an exotic dancer, femme fatale, spy, and courtesan, she became a legend in her own life time.

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born at Leeuwarden in the Netherlands on 7th August 1876. Born into a wealthy environment, in which she and her siblings grew up in a sheltered, bourgeois world, she developed a rich imagination and fared well at school. By the age of nineteen her family life fell apart, it was then on 11th July 1895 that she married Rudolph MacLeod, twenty years her senior and a commissioned officer in the Dutch East Indies Army.

The family moved to Java where Margaretha bore Rudolph two children, a son, Norman John and a daughter. Whilst in this exotic world she became acquainted with the dances that would later inspire her work as a dancer. Tragically following an incident of poisoning Norman John died whilst still an infant. Following this tragedy the family returned to the Netherlands. She was divorced in 1906, shortly after the return from the East, the marriage being dissolved mainly due to her husband's brutality. Margaretha then explored Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and Vienna abandoning her daughter to the care of Rudolph Macleod.

Margret

Aka Mata Hari More about Mata Hari

She then emerged as an Eastern Dancer in the Paris salon of Madam Kireevsky. It was now that she became Mata Hari working in Monsieur Guimet's museum for Asian Art. She adopted the name Mata Hari or 'Eye of the Day' in Malaysian to add to her supposed mystery. She became a sensation by dancing in the nude; within weeks she was the talk of the Parisian Salons. When interviewed by journalists she invented wild stories about holy temples in India and how she had studied Eastern dance. She stated her mother was a Javanese princess, and her father a Scottish Lord. The Press loved her stories and she became