- She was committed to the St. Lawrence State Hospital in Ogdensburg, New York, for depression and schizophrenia. After the passing of her mother in 1958, she would have not a family visit until a half-niece discovered her there in 1984.
- She is considered as the first nude star, in that her roles in Inspiration (1915) and Purity (1916) both had her performing nude scenes as a leading lady. She was also nude in The Girl o' Dreams (1918) and Heedless Moths (1921).
- She is a distant relative of actor, James Martin Kelly.
- In 2009, playwright and actress Elaine Kuracina wrote and starred in a play about Munson's life at the State University of New York at Potsdam, about thirty miles from Ogdensburg.
- She was a top artist's model in the early 1900s.
- The producers of Heedless Moths (1921) cast Jane Thomas to play Audrey in the emotional scenes, since they felt there was a resemblance. Audrey was also in the film doing nude scenes in long shots.
- After a nationwide search for the "perfect man" to marry, advertised in newspapers, Munson announced in September 1921 her list of five finalists. The men mentioned resided in Dallas, Texas, Omaha, Nebraska, Chicago, Illinois, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Tucson, Arizona. She planned to interview each man before making her decision. No wedding would ever take place.
- On May 27, 1922, Munson attempted suicide by swallowing a solution of bichloride of mercury.
- By 1920 Munson, unable to find work anywhere, was reported as living in Syracuse, New York, supported by her mother, who sold kitchen utensils door to door. In November 1920 she was said to be working as a ticket-taker in a dime museum.
- In 1919 Audrey Munson was living with her mother in a boarding house at 164 West 65th Street, Manhattan, owned by Dr. Walter Wilkins. Wilkins fell in love with Munson, and on February 27 murdered his wife, Julia, so he could be available for marriage. Munson and her mother left New York, and the police sought them for questioning. After a nationwide hunt, they were located. They refused to return to New York, but were questioned by agents from the Burns Detective Agency in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The contents of the affidavits they supplied have never been revealed, but Audrey Munson strongly denied she had any romantic relationship with Dr. Wilkins. Wilkins was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to the electric chair. He hanged himself in his prison cell before the sentence could be carried out.
- Munson's second film, Purity (1916), made by the American Film Company in Santa Barbara, California and directed by Rae Berger, is the only one of her films to survive, being rediscovered in 1993 in a "pornography" collection in France and acquired by the French national cinema archive.
- In February 1921, agent-producer Allen Rock took out advertisements showing a $27,500 check he said he had paid Munson to star in a fourth film titled Heedless Moths, directed by Robert Z. Leonard from his own screenplay based on these writings. She later said the $27,500 check was just a "publicity stunt," and she filed suit against Allen Rock. Those proceedings revealed that the twenty articles had been ghostwritten by journalist Henry Leyford Gates.
- Her third film, The Girl o' Dreams, also made by American in Santa Barbara and probably directed by Tom Ricketts from a story by William Pigott (the American Film Institute catalog lists Pigott as director, but all his other credits list him as a writer), was completed by the fall of 1916, but although the film is mentioned on the credit lists of several of its actors in the October 21, 1916 Motion Picture Studio Directory it was not released at that time and was not even copyrighted until December 31, 1918; there is no subsequent mention of the film and it may never have been released.
- There are accounts where her mother insists she married the son of a "Comstock Lode" silver heir, Hermann Oelrichs Jr., then the richest bachelor in America. There is no record of this. On January 27, 1919, she wrote a rambling letter to the U.S. State Department denouncing Oelrichs as part of a pro-German network that had driven her out of the movie business. She said she planned to abandon the United States to restart her movie career in England.
- Although Munson's appearance in Inspiration is sometimes said to be the first occasion of an American actress appearing nude in a non-pornographic film, according to film historian Karen Ward Mahr, it was actually Margaret Edwards who did so in Hypocrites, which was released earlier in 1915.
- By the time she turned 100, she had no teeth and lost much of her hearing but was otherwise in good health. Shortly after her 100th birthday, Munson broke a hip. Munson died on February 20, 1996, at the age of 104. She was buried at New Haven Cemetery in New Haven, New York and she received a headstone on her grave on June 8, 2016, 20 years after her death and on what would have been her 125th birthday.
- Audrey Marie Munson was born in Rochester, New York, on June 8, 1891, to Edgar Munson (1857-1945), who was a streetcar conductor and Western real estate speculator descended from English Puritans, and Katherine "Kittie" Mahaney (1863-1958), a daughter of Irish immigrants.
- Her parents divorced when she was eight, and Audrey and her mother moved to Providence, Rhode Island.
- By 1915, she was so well established that she became Alexander Stirling Calder's model of choice, when he became Director of Sculpture for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco that year.
- In the mid-1950s Munson was sufficiently famous to serve as the subject of an anecdote in a memoir that P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton wrote of their years on Broadway, Bring on the Girls! (1953), though that memoir is considered more fiction than fact by Wodehouse's biographer.
- She was an American artist's model and film actress, and considered to be "America's first supermodel.".
- The Oswego County judge ordered Munson be admitted into a psychiatric facility for treatment on her 40th birthday.
- In her time, she was variously known as "Miss Manhattan", the "Panama-Pacific Girl", the "Exposition Girl" and "American Venus.".
- While window-shopping on Fifth Avenue with her mother she was spotted by photographer Felix Benedict Herzog, who asked her to pose for him at his studio in the Lincoln Arcade Building on Broadway and 65th Street.[1] Herzog introduced her to his friends in the art world.
- From January through May 1921 a series of twenty serialized articles ran in Hearst's Sunday Magazine in dozens of Sunday newspaper supplements, under Munson's name, the whole series entitled By the 'Queen of the Artists' Studios'. The twenty articles relate anecdotes from her career, with warnings about the fates of other models. In one she asked the reader to imagine her future: "What becomes of the artists' models? I am wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl, her very abandonment of draperies accentuating rather than diminishing her modesty and purity, and asked themselves the question, "Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful?".
- Munson would pose for a few well-known visual artists. Including painter Francis Coates Jones, illustrators Harrison Fisher, Archie Gunn, and Charles Dana Gibson, and photographers Herzog and Arnold Genthe. But she was predominantly a sculptors' model.
- Munson became the model of choice for the first tier of American sculptors, posing for a long list of freestanding statuary, monuments, and allegorical architectural sculpture on state capitols and other major public buildings. According to The Sun in 1913, "Over a hundred artists agree that if the name of Miss Manhattan belongs to anyone in particular it is to this young woman.".
- She had no visitors at the asylum for over 25 years after her mother died in 1958, but she was rediscovered there by a half-niece, Darlene Bradley, in 1984, when Munson was 93.
- Her figure was "ninety times repeated against the sky" on one building alone, atop the colonnades of the Court of the Universe, roughly modeled on St. Peter's Square in the Vatican. In fact, Munson posed for three-fifths of the sculpture created for the event and earned fame as the "Panama-Pacific Girl".
- She posed for muralist William de Leftwich Dodge, who gave her a letter of introduction to Isidore Konti. Konti was her first sculptor, and her first nude modeling.
- She remained in the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane in Ogdensburg, where she was treated for depression and schizophrenia, for 65 years, until her death at the age of 104. During her stay at the institution, she would often take care of her beauty with milk, yogurt and urine.
- Munson's first acknowledged credit is Konti's marble statuary called Three Graces unveiled in the new Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Astor in Times Square in September 1909. She posed for all three graces.
- She was the model or inspiration for more than twelve statues in New York City, and many others elsewhere.
- On October 3, 1921 she was arrested at the Royal Theater (later the Towne Theater) in St. Louis on a morals charge related to her personal appearance with the film Innocence (the reissue title of Purity), in which she had a leading role. She and her manager, independent film producer Ben Judell, were both acquitted. Weeks later she was still appearing in St. Louis, along with screenings of Innocence, enacting "a series of new poses from famous paintings".
- In the mid-1980s, Munson, in her mid-90s, was moved to a nursing home in Massena, New York, as the original hospital closed, however, she would often escape to a nearby bar, with employees in the nursing home having to find her. As a result, she was moved back to the new mental institution.
- In 2010, film director Roberto Serrini made a documentary about Munson which was featured in several news outlets including the New York Post.
- She began acting more erratically, reportedly calling herself "Baroness Audrey Meri Munson-Monson.".
- At thirty, Audrey was getting old for a model in that day. And the architectural landscape was shifting as well; Modernism was on the rise and the costs associated with the ornamentation and intricacies of the Beaux-Arts style were becoming a concern. So Audrey left the city and moved upstate with her mother, but she could never quite get used to small-town life. She would roller-skate along the unpaved country roads and wear glamorous clothes from her previous life in the big city. The locals thought it strange, and she felt a sense of longing for where she had been and of not belonging where she was.
- A book, The Curse of Beauty: The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America's First Supermodel, is bringing her story to light.
- A photographer approached her one day and gave Audrey his card, asking if she would pose for some portraits. Her mom was invited too. Intentions were good. These photoshoots were fully-clothed affairs. After some success, the photographer introduced Munson to his friend and famous sculptor Isidore Konti. He, too, was interested in hiring Munson for his work. But for this endeavor she would have to pose "in the altogether" (without clothes). She and her mother agreed. For decades, the resulting sculptural set (three muses, all patterned after Audrey) was in the lobby of the Hotel Astor. Audrey called this statue "a souvenir of my mother's consent.".
- Although the jobs required nudity, neither Munson nor her mother, hard up for money, objected.
- Her face and body were the basis for "Civic Fame," the statue that stands atop the Municipal Building at 1 Centre St., as well as the figure of Columbia adorning the USS Maine National Monument in Columbus Circle and the "Spirit of Commerce" angel at the northern base of the Manhattan Bridge.
- "She was a muse," says Fiane Rozas, who has written a screenplay inspired by Munson's life. "She had a gift for inspiring artists. That's why they wanted her.".
- The 1915 silent movie "Inspiration" found Munson stripping down on camera - the first time nudity was shown in a non-pornographic film. She appeared in more pictures and was making "lots of money," which her estranged father complained she was spending "like water.".
- One contemporary account concluded that Audrey Munson "posed for more public works than anyone" - at least a dozen of which are still on public display.
- New Yorkers may not know it, but they see Munson everywhere. She is the face of Pomona, the Roman goddess of abundance, on the Pulitzer Fountain at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, across from the Plaza Hotel. Sje is also lounging above the front door of the Frick and coyly tucked in a niche outside the New York Public Library's main branch.
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