Beauty isn't consistent across cultures, so one person's historical hottie might be another
person's old-timey troll.
But there are certain names across history that crop up again and again as the most attractive.
These are the hottest famous people from history.
In 1853, Austrian Emperor Franz Josef traveled to meet Duchess Helene, whom his mother had
picked out to be his future wife.
The meeting was just meant to be a formal acknowledgement, but then Franz Josef took
one look at Helene's younger sister Elisabeth, nicknamed Sisi, and immediately proposed to
her instead.
As Empress of Austria, Sisi's swoon-inducing looks were famous, and remain famous today,
with multiple actresses trying over the years to capture her unearthly beauty.
She had wavy brown hair down to her ankles, a face that could launch more ships than a
full-blown navy, and an athletic frame that was rare for a woman of her era.
She owned one of history's earliest examples of a recreational gym, and she spent hours
each day working out and building her muscle tone.
Her waist was just 19.5 inches, so it's really no wonder that Franz Josef fell for her.
But while Sisi's life may sound like a fairy tale, it was anything but.
She didn't want to be Empress, and her life was filled with tragedy, following the untimely
deaths of her only child and her sister, Sisi herself was assassinated despite the fact
that she had devoted herself to the poor, and left almost all her personal fortune to
charity.
Samuel Coleridge once wrote that Lord Byron had a face "so beautiful, a countenance I
scarcely ever saw."
Lady Caroline Lamb called him "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."
Portraits of the poet still carry quite a simmer.
Just looking at them is enough to conjure images of this literary heartthrob sweeping
you off your feet.
But while Byron's name may still be shorthand for "hottie," he may have actually been less
conventionally attractive than you might think.
According to a BBC documentary series about Regency Britain, Byron was borderline obese,
clocking in at 194 pounds while only standing 5'8."
He also had a club foot and walked with a limp.
Additionally, he had some questionable appetites, including probably seducing his half-sister
and lusting after teenage Greek boys.
So how is it that we remember Bryon as being undeniably beautiful and romantic?
It turns out that he was a master at PR.
Any image of himself he didn't like, he had destroyed.
The paintings of him that still exist are basically the historical equivalent of a carefully
curated Instagram page.
To say that John Wilkes Booth was famous for his looks is like saying Joseph Stalin was
famous for his poetry.
Both certainly were noted in that area, but it doesn't change their less attractive qualities.
Before Booth went down in history as one of America's most infamous assassins, he was
known as an actor who was quite the looker.
He had dark hair, piercing eyes, and an agile frame.
He had so many female fans you could say that Booth-mania was the original Beatlemania.
What's rarely noted about Booth is that his adult life revolved around an intense rivalry
with his brother.
Edwin Booth was the best actor of his day and more classically handsome, in opposition
to John's wild charms.
He was also a staunch supporter of the Union, and in a textbook example of sibling rivalry,
John supported the South.
Although there's not really any evidence for it, it's fun to speculate that sibling rivalry
may have factored into John's assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
The president was killed just as Edwin was in the middle of a successful run as Hamlet,
so it's probably fair to stay that John's showstopper upstaged his brother's "to be,
or not to be" performance.
To illustrate just how good-looking Lillie Langtry was, it should be noted that even
the dourly serious Encyclopedia Britannica makes space to tell its readers just how hot
she was.
A British society woman, Langtry initially made waves by appearing on the London stage
in 1881.
That was a bit of a major deal at a time when acting was a job that was considered far beneath
a well-bred woman.
But while Langtry's acting may have ensured she got into headlines, it wasn't what kept
her there.
That would be her looks, and what her looks led to.
She was considered so desirable that the future King Edward VII put all his efforts into seducing
her.
Alas, looks fade, kings eventually have to settle down, and even the most attractive
people wind up invisible to anyone below the age of 40.
Luckily, Langtry future-proofed herself against this inevitability when she was still in her
twenties.
In 1901, she opened her own theatre, allowing herself to stay in the world she loved even
once she stopped acting herself.
She also set up her own stable for racing horses, thereby simultaneously conquering
the two worlds posh Londoners cared most about.
Ever since he was elected, John Fitzgerald Kennedy has had a reputation as one of the
hottest, if not the hottest, men to ever occupy the Oval Office.
Still to this day, plenty of Americans know the story that Kennedy won the 1960 presidential
debates against Richard Nixon because the cameras could barely contain how handsome
he was.
"I don't want the talents of any American to go to waste."
The story goes that when Kennedy and Nixon went face to face, radio listeners thought
that Nixon won, while TV viewers, enthralled by JFK's appearance, plumped for Kennedy.
It's certainly true that Kennedy rocked a dapper look and that Nixon was far from the
most conventionally handsome or charismatic candidate.
But the idea that it was Kennedy's looks that carried the debate doesn't actually hold up,
as there's almost no data to back up the myth that radio listeners thought Nixon won.
So if Kennedy's killer looks didn't really win him the presidency, what is that story
doing in a video about historical hotties?
Well, the fact that people believe that his appearance won him the debate because he was
so good-looking proves just how good looking people thought he was!
Let's be real, if Nixon had been elected in 1960, nobody would've been saying that he
triumphed because he was so hot.
By age thirteen, Marie Antoinette was already regarded as a great beauty.
Smithsonian Magazine notes that she had "thick, ash-blond hair, large, grayish blue eyes and
a radiant complexion."
When she was married off to Louis XVI of France just one year later, she was so charming,
so attractive, and so extroverted, that she immediately won a kiss from her fiance's father,
Louis XV.
In another time and place, her beauty might've led to her becoming a queen beloved by her
nation.
Sadly for her, though her legend lives on in pop culture today, she didn't actually
live in another time or place.
She lived in France in the late 18th Century, which was a place on the verge of detonating
like a bomb.
The masses were stifled by unfair laws, beset by famine, crippled by taxes, and trapped
in a shattered economy.
Into this came a beautiful, vivacious girl who thought nothing of spending the equivalent
of over $6 million in today's money on a pretend peasant village to play in in her palace gardens.
In retrospect, there was really only one way this could end.
On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined in front of a Parisian mob who
were baying for her blood.
She was only 37.
Giacomo Casanova is known today primarily for being eye candy so exquisite that women
were powerless before him.
When he crops up in pop culture, he's usually played by guys like Heath Ledger and David
Tennant, exactly the sort of men you would imagine swinging in your bedroom window, sweeping
you off your feet, and seducing you with style.
Yet he would've hated this reputation.
He saw his life's work not as seduction, but as literature and the arts.
While what we remember of Casanova's life tends to be his affairs with over 120 women,
about two-thirds of his autobiography has nothing to do with love-making.
Outside of his romantic exploits, he wrote mathematical treatises, a proto-science fiction
novel, a translation of the Iliad, and even a pamphlet that could be considered feminist.
Ending his life working as a librarian, he likely hoped to be remembered, if he was remembered
for anything at all, as an intellectual.
And yet here he is, slumming it on a list of the most famous hotties of all time.
History isn't always fair.
By the standards of her day, Catherine the Great was pretty average looking.
But the funny thing about attraction is that there are no hard and fast rules.
While Catherine, who's been played onscreen by the likes of Helen Mirren and Catherine
Zeta-Jones, wasn't considered a looker either then or now, she did have one quality that
made everyone she met go loopy for her: she was reportedly one of the most charming women
to have ever lived.
By all accounts, she was witty, erudite, knowledgeable, and had a fantastic knack for actually listening
to what other people were saying, rather than simply waiting for a gap in the conversation.
Even as a child, she had these qualities.
When she met Frederick the Great of Prussia when she was just four, she made such an impression
on him that he remembered her for the rest of his life.
The upshot of this is that as an adult, Catherine was never short on lovers.
She took at least three major men to her bedroom while her husband was still alive, and that's
not even including the procession of lovers she indulged in toward the end of her life.
Hey, power and personality are hot!
In the wake of the Interregnum, which saw puritanical Oliver Cromwell running England,
Britain went through a backlash of parties, hedonism, and oodles of lovemaking.
It was during this era of Restoration that Barbara Villiers rose higher than she would've
ever otherwise dreamed possible.
The mistress of Charles II, she knew she was attractive, and she dressed in a way that
flaunted her beauty.
Her affairs were legendary, including with John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough and
ancestor of Winston Churchill.
She sat for so many portraits that she became one of the most recognizable women in Britain.
It's probably fair to say that her face was that of the entire Restoration era.
Unfortunately, this made her a major target for public abuse.
She was called "the curse of the nation," and the king's devotion to her helped make
the crown extremely unpopular for a time.
But although Villiers ended her life in poverty, she managed to outlive nearly all her critics,
dying in 1709 at the age of 68.
In this case, beauty had the last laugh.
Nobody knows what the real Helen of Troy actually looked like, or if there even was a real Helen
of Troy. but that hasn't stopped people from gossiping about her for thousands of years.
In 2018, History Today made a list of all the things Helen of Troy has been called over
the millennia.
It ranged from Shakespeare calling her a "strumpet," to Chaucer indirectly labeling
her a "harlot," to others calling her a "tart," a "flurt," and some not-safe-for-work descriptors.
The woman whose face launched a thousand ships has often been held up as the Western ideal
of beauty.
But she's also a good poster child for how societies have often reacted to beautiful
women with active love lives.
That is to say, they've not always been super keen on them.
"I've heard rumors of your beauty.
For once, the gossips were right."
Of course, it's debatable if Helen, who's been played onscreen by the likes of Diane
Kruger, should even count as a historic figure.
She's mostly known from Homer's Iliad and Greek myth.
But while Helen herself might be a myth, it's likely that she's a blend of many real ancient
women.
That really demonstrates just how judgmental societies can be towards attractive women,
as Helen was slandered for millennia despite quite possibly not even being a real person.
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