Biography

A famous photo of Kiki taken by Man Ray appears on the wall of Emma Thompson's apartment in Dead Again (1991).

Published an autobiography, "Kiki's Memoirs" (1929), with an introduction by Ernest Hemingway. He noted, "You have a book here written by a woman who was never a lady at any time. For about ten years she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady".

Kiki was the lover and muse of artist Man Ray from 1921 to 1929. He took many photographs of her, some quite famous, and featured her in his avant-garde films "Le Retour à la Raison" (1923), "Emak-Bakia" (1926), and "L'Étoile de mer" (1928).

Had her own Paris cabaret, "Chez Kiki", in the late 1930s.

Kiki's last years were melancholy. No longer the famed "Queen of Montparnasse" of the 1920s, she was plagued with drug and alcohol problems and arrested twice for cocaine possession (in 1939 and 1946). Art Buchwald saw Kiki in Paris in the late 1940s and wrote, "She went from cafe to cafe and danced on tables while the crowd pretended to love it. I found it sad the first time I saw it - and even sadder each time after that". When she died at 51, only a handful of people attended her funeral. Former lover Man Ray was not one of them.