Michèle Fitous­si is the author of screen­plays, fic­tion and non-fic­tion, includ­ing the inter­na­tion­al best­sellers Superwoman’s had Enough and The Pris­on­er. She also co-wrote Stolen Lives with Mali­ka Oufkir, which sold more than a mil­lion copies through­out the world and remained on the New York Times best-sell­er list for 25 weeks after being stamped as an ​“Oprah Book” by Oprah Win­frey. Her newest book, Hele­na Rubin­stein: The Woman Who Invent­ed Beau­ty, is now avail­able. She will be blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

Peo­ple always ask me the same ques­tion: ​‘What made you want to write about Hele­na Rubin­stein?’ And the answer is always the same. When I began to read her auto­bi­og­ra­phy – in which she does noth­ing but lie – it made me want to know more, and I became pas­sion­ate about the roman­tic yet mod­ern sto­ry of this petite ( 4’8”) woman of Pol­ish descent, always perched on sky-high heels, who passed away 48 years ago. 

I imme­di­ate­ly under­stood the poten­tial of her sto­ry, and all there was to tell. Not least start­ing with her solo depar­ture to Aus­tralia; her two-month boat jour­ney, twelve pots of cream from her moth­er in her suit­case. It was 1896, she was 24 years old, spoke no Eng­lish, had nev­er met her Aus­tralian fam­i­ly – and she was head­ing into the unknown with a cer­tain amount of brav­ery and deter­mi­na­tion which fas­ci­nat­ed me. She was an adven­tur­er, and I loved that about her. 

I was, and remain, fas­ci­nat­ed by her enthu­si­asm, her curios­i­ty, her brav­ery and her youth­ful­ness. She was afraid of noth­ing and had an end­less amount of ener­gy, pas­sion, and intel­li­gence. She was a real hero­ine and, as she used to say, all the things she’d expe­ri­enced could eas­i­ly have filled half a dozen lives. She remains a role mod­el and an inspi­ra­tion for women all over the world. 

With her we trav­el across the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry through the medi­um of beau­ty and art, we wit­ness the empow­er­ment of women, the birth of con­sumerism, mar­ket­ing and pub­lic­i­ty. We spend time in Krakow, Paris, New York, Mel­bourne and Lon­don… She has lived a thou­sand lives, and I thought it was worth shed­ding more light on them. 

Michèle Fitous­si was born in Tunisia to French par­ents, and has lived in Paris since the age of five. She worked as a jour­nal­ist at Elle mag­a­zine for years, inter­view­ing world lead­ers in areas as var­ied as pol­i­tics, human sci­ences, sports, lit­er­a­ture and the media.

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