Jane Barnell

Jane Barnell (previously O'Boyle) (January 3, 1871– Unknown) was an American bearded lady who worked in circus sideshows, dime museums and carnivals. A trapeze artist and commercial photographer, who used various stage names including Madame Olga, Lady Olga and Lady Olga Roderick. In her only film role in Tod Browning's cult classic Freaks, using her sideshow stage name Olga Roderick, she was billed as the "Bearded Lady".

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. When she applied for her social security card in May 1939, she gave her parents as George Barnell and Nancy Shaw. Her mother's name is not mentioned in the interviews she gave. She was their second child, and she had three sisters and two brothers. She was named after her maternal grandmother. Her mother was from York County, South Carolina. By two years of age, she was capable of growing a beard. 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. The circus consisted of the Muslim woman who worked as manager, two of her daughters who danced, and three sons who juggled and were tight rope walkers. 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 them. 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 five. He had either tracked the circus from the Carolinas and then all the way to Europe, or the woman who ran the circus had the Berlin police contact the sheriff of Wilmington.

After that incident, Barnell was placed in the care of her Catawban grandmother who lived in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. 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. She returned to her grandmother's farm. 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 long. She went back to North Carolina every winter until her grandmother died in 1899. She worked with the Robinson circus for fourteen years.

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