A Ukrainian dancer of the Kyiv City Ballet company stretches prior to a performance at the Theatre de Chatelet, in Paris, Tuesday, March 8, 2022. The Kyiv City Ballet danced to a full house in Paris for the last show of a French tour that has left the company stranded after the war broke out in Ukraine. They described being physically and emotionally exhausted. Being given the opportunity to train and dance was for many a chance to focus on something other than the war. (Photo by Thibault Camus/AP Photo)

Figure Skating, ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating Trophee de France 2016/2017, Ice Dance Short Dance, Paris, France on November 11, 2016. Alexandra Nazarova and Maxim Nikitin of Ukraine compete. (Photo by Charles Platiau/Reuters)

Elodie Katze, co-owner of Wild Pole Studio, performs a trick on a pole as students look on during a class at the pole dancing studio Wild Pole in Paris, France, on March 26, 2024. (Photo by Benoit Tessier/Reuters)

Syrian dancer and choreographer Yara al-Hasbani performs a dance on the empty Trocadero square in front of the Eiffel tower in Paris on April 22, 2020, on the 37th day of a strict lockdown in France to stop the spread of COVID-19 (novel coronavirus). (Photo by Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP Photo)

Auditioning performers follow resident choreographer Erik Sorensen, center back, at the Sydney Dance Company in a routine during castings in Moulin Rouge's current show “Féerie”, in Sydney, Australia, Thursday, July 28, 2016. The show's artistic team is in Australia to choose new talent to perform with one of the most famous cabarets that has been illuminating Paris since 1889. (Photo by Rob Griffith/AP Photo)

A Parisian dances at the installation Electronica, a unique look at the great classics of 20th century electronic music, played under the vaults at the Collège des Bernardins part of Nuit Blanche, an annual evening festival of culture and art on October 03, 2020 in Paris, France. Scaled down this year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival is split across the left and right banks of the city with many outdoor exhibitions to enable social distancing. (Photo by Kiran Ridley/Getty Images)

Lido cabaret dancers perform during a demonstration outside the cabaret as dancers, other employees and union activists are gathering to try to save their jobs and the history of the cabaret, known for its dinner theater and its “Bluebell Girls” revue, Saturday, May 28, 2022 in Paris. Amid financial troubles and changing times, the venue's new corporate owner is ditching most of the Lido's staff and its high-kicking, high-glamour dance shows – which date back decades and inspired copycats from Las Vegas to Beirut – in favor of more modest musical revues. (Photo by Thomas Padilla/AP Photo)

“Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Nicknamed the “Bronze Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, and even the “Créole Goddess” in anglophone nations.

Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture and to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, but turned it down), for assisting the French Resistance during World War II and for being the first American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre”.

Photo: American entertainer Josephine Baker in costume for her famous “banana dance”. Baker was an overnight sensation when she arrived in Paris in the mid-1920s. (Photo by Walery/Getty Images)