Nearly eight decades after her death, Marie Lloyd remains one of the most potent figures of twentieth-century popular culture. A giantess of the English music hall whose turbulent career spanned the Victorian and Edwardian ages and embraced the First World War, she epitomised the cheeky cockney culgarity of those who trod the boards. A victim of domestic violence, a performer who built her career on a well-tuned sense of innuendo and one of the first showbiz superstars, she is an essentially modern figure - now for the first time the subject of a modern biography.