After Madame Tussauds, Shah Rukh’s wax statue in Paris

Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan has more reason to smile - he will have a second wax look alike coming up in the West, this time in France. Barely a year after his wax statue was unveiled at Madame Tussauds, London, Paris’s Grevin wax museum will present King Khan’s wax statue next month.

This will make Shah Rukh the second Indian celebrity after Mahatma Gandhi to have a wax statue in Grevin and the first Bollywood star to have two wax statues in the two most prestigious wax museums worldwide.

Stating this in Mumbai Friday, Grevin’s marketing director Frederic Gouguidis said that this was the outcome of its exclusive partnership with the travel major, Cox and Kings, in the Indian market.

Khan is extremely popular in France with a huge fan following and the wax statue would give Indians another reason to travel to that country, he added.

Paris Convention & Visitors Bureau managing director Paul Roll said that Paris is a hot destination among Indian tourists. “Last year, over 300,000 Indians visited France, the second largest number after China,” Roll said.

A 19th century French journalist Arthur Meyer conceived Grevin’s wax museum. He collaborated with Alfred Grevin, a cartoonist, sculptor and costume designer to work on the project.

When the wax museum doors were finally thrown open to the public in June 1882, it was a grand success.

Some of the wax statues in the Grevin collection include Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Pope John Paul-II, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson.

IANS