Born Jeanne Rocques in 1889 to a gifted Parisian family—her mother was a feminist journalist, her father a composer—Musidora studied art before changing to theater. She began performing in 1908, adopting Musidora (the heroine of a Théophile Gautier novel) as her stage name and playing in music halls like the Bataclan and Folies Bergère. She sang, danced, and did imitations, sometimes all in the same show. Director Louis Feuillade and producer Léon Gaumont spotted Musidora at the Folies Bergère and invited her to come to the studio.

Before Feuillade “discovered” her, Musidora had made her film debut as a suicidal seamstress in the 1913 melodrama Les Misères de l’Aiguille, produced by the Cinéma du Peuple a film cooperative. After “The Vampires” serial concluded, she happily was able to recycle the Irma Vep figure in other characters for cinema.

Musidora, like many of her female colleagues, is remembered primarily as an actor rather than a filmmaker. A producer and screenwriter, she was also director or co-director of four silent films, and some have credited her with an additional three. Her fame as Irma Vep, the anti-heroine of Louis Feuillade’s serial Les Vampires (1915–16) has eclipsed the productions of Société des Films Musidora, the production company she started in 1918. Yet behind Irma Vep was “a designer, caricaturist, painter, costumer, poet, writer,” according to historian Rachel Guyon notes, “and above all, the third woman in France to become a director.”