If you’ve ever done a first-aid course, you’ve given mouth-to-mouth to a girl who drowned in Paris well over a hundred years ago.
The story goes like this: in the late 1880s a young woman was pulled out of the Seine, unidentified, and someone at the morgue was so struck by her face (serene, almost smiling) that they took a plaster cast of it. Nobody knows who she was. Nobody even knows for sure that the drowning part is true: other versions say the mask came from a model, or from a mask-maker’s daughter. It’s a legend with a real object attached.
The object is real, though. After 1900 copies of the mask hung on the walls of bohemian homes all over Europe, and writers like Rilke and Camus wrote about her smile.
Then, in 1960, the Norwegian toymaker Åsmund Lærdal, working with the doctors Peter Safar and James Elam, presented Resusci Anne, the CPR training mannequin. He wanted a woman’s face (male trainees might balk at kissing a man) and he chose hers. Millions of people have practised on it since, which is how she earned the title of “the most kissed face of all time”.
And before you start, you’re taught to check on her: “Annie, are you OK?“. Yes, that’s where the chorus of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal comes from.
Seriously.
The play Anna, estàs bé by Jesús Bordas Luque is built around her.