Agns Souret

French actress and dancer who was the winner of the inaugural Miss France competition in 1920. In 1919, the dark brown haired, brown eyed Agnès Souret was the winner of a beauty competition to become Miss Midi-Pyrénées. In 1920, she was acclaimed the most beautiful woman in France (La plus belle femme de France) in a contest now regarded as the inaugural Miss France competition. The seventeen-year-old Souret won over 2000 entrants and attracted 115,000 votes. In Le Figaro, she was described as a "dazzling beauty." Souret’s success in the competition and the subsequent publicity resulted in her becoming for a few years one of the most celebrated women in France. Her photograph was extensively circulated in journals and magazines. Details of her life were commonplace in the gossip columns of the early '20s. She appeared in a dancing role at the famous Parisian music hall the Folies Bergère and at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. She was in two films directed by Henry Houry: La Maison des pendus and Le Lys du Mont Saint-Michel. Her fame extended beyond France to the United Kingdom where in 1922 she appeared in the revue Pins and Needles at the Gaiety Theatre in the West End of London. She published a book The Famous Book of Beauty Secrets and toured major cities with acclaim. Agnès Souret died of peritonitis in September 1928 while on a tour of Argentina. Link to Wikipedia biography