Jane Barnell was an American bearded lady who worked in sideshow and used the stage name Lady Olga or Madame Olga.
Background
Jane Barnell was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to George Barnell, a Russian Jewish itinerant wagon maker, and his wife, a woman of Irish and Catawban ancestry. Her mother was from York County, South Carolina. Her mother took her to hoodoo doctors and other folk healers to remove her condition.
In 1875, Barnell"s mother sold the 4-year-old Jane to the Great Orient Family Circus and Menagerie while her father was away on business in Baltimore.
Career
By two years of age she was capable of growing a beard. Jane toured with the circus for several months around the South before the circus went to New Orleans, left for Europe, and took her with her. In Europe the circus toured with a German circus.
She fell ill with typhoid fever in Berlin.
She was placed in a charity hospital and later in an orphanage. She was later found by her father by the time she was 5.
He had either tracked the circus from the Carolinas and the all the way to Europe, or the woman who ran the circus had the Berlin police contact the sheriff of Wilmington. She began to shave in order to conceal her condition.
Her grandmother told her stories about Florence Nightingale, which inspired her to work as a student nurse in the old city hospital at Wilmington when she turned 17.
She worked there for about a year until an unpleasant incident occurred that made her believe she would never have a normal life. In spring 1892 she met a circus performer named Professor William Heckler who talked her into stopping shaving and got her employment with John Robinson’s Circus. She tried several stage names before eventually settling on Lady Olga Roderick.
At that time her beard was 13 inches lougitude
She worked with the Robinson circus for fourteen years. Barnell toured for a time with a number of circuses, including the Ringling Brothers circus, and later joined Hubert"s Museum in Times Square, New New York
She appeared in a number of films, most famously Tod Browning"s Freaks (1932) which, according to the documentary on the Freaks Digital Video Disc (Freaks: The Sideshow Cinema, 2004), left her unhappy with the overall portrayal of the sideshow performers in the film.