Elisabeth of Austria

Known to her family and posterity as Sisi: Bavarian-born, sixteen at her marriage, immediately stifled by the rigid Habsburg court she had married into. She spent decades traveling restlessly between Hungary, Corfu, Madeira, and Switzerland, devoted to her hair, her horses, and a regimen of compulsive exercise and near-starvation diet. She was murdered in Geneva in 1898 by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, who stabbed her with a sharpened file.