20 Fascinating Photos of Historical Figures at the Beach

Historical figures are just like us: Sometimes, they go to the beach. Whether it’s to kick back and relax, to shoot a movie, or to stay far away from a regime that exiled them—well, that depends on the person. Here are 20 photos of notable folks by the sea.

1. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt
2. Daphne du Maurier
3. Pablo Picasso
4. George Bernard Shaw
5. Princess Margaret
6. Jim Brown
7. Jack and Charmian London
8. Charlotte Boyle, Duke Kahanamoku, and Ethelda Bleibtrey
9. Coco Chanel and Arthur Capel
10. Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky
11. Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
12. Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanov
13. The Beatles
14. Winston Churchill
15. Al Smith
16. Frank Sinatra
17. Mahatma Gandhi
18. Maria Callas and Giovanni Battista Meneghini
19. Jean Cocteau and Elsa Maxwell
20. Tina Turner

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt

As a kid, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his family summered on Canada’s Campobello Island off the coast of Maine. He continued the tradition with his wife Eleanor and their kids, though his trips became much less frequent after he became president. Here he is with Eleanor in 1920.

Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier was a longtime resident of Cornwall, England, where she set many of her novels. Here she is by the shore with her three children in June 1944. At the time, her husband, Frederick Browning, was a commanding officer in World War II.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso chatting with an unknown woman at Golfe-Juan, a resort in Vallauris on France’s Côte d’Azur, sometime in the 1960s. Picasso had moved to the Côte d’Azur in the late 1940s and remained there until his death in 1973.

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George Bernard Shaw

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw also spent some time on the Côte d’Azur. Here he is in Antibes in 1949. He was 93 at the time.

Princess Margaret

Princess Margaret talks to a friend on the private Caribbean island of Mustique in February 1976. Her villa, Les Jolies Eaux, is now available to rent for $33,000 or $48,500 per week (depending on the dates). It’s complete with five bedrooms, two housekeepers, a butler, and a chef.

Jim Brown

Jim Brown—football legend, activist, actor—in Jamaica in March 1967. There’s a reason Brown’s beach attire is so unorthodox: He was in costume while filming Dark of the Sun (1968), a war adventure film about the Congo crisis of the early 1960s.

Jack and Charmian London

The Call of the Wild author Jack London with his wife and fellow writer, Charmian London, on Hawaii’s Waikīkī Beach in 1915. Jack wrote about the islands in fiction and nonfiction; Charmian published accounts of their experiences there, too.

Charlotte Boyle, Duke Kahanamoku, and Ethelda Bleibtrey

During his time in Hawaii, Jack London got to be friends with Duke Kahanamoku, winner of three Olympic gold (and two silver) medals in swimming. Here’s Kahanamoku—also known as the father of modern surfing—on Waikīkī Beach in 1915 with fellow Olympic swimmers Ethelda Bleibtrey (right) and Charlotte Boyle. Bleibtrey won three gold medals at the 1920 Antwerp Games. One year earlier, she had been arrested at New York’s Manhattan Beach for swimming without stockings.

Coco Chanel and Arthur Capel

Coco Chanel and her lover, English polo player Arthur “Boy” Capel, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, in 1917. Capel helped finance some of Chanel’s early fashion, and the two continued their relationship even after Capel married an English aristocrat in 1918. He died in a car crash the following year.

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Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky

This image makes up for in historical significance what it lacks in idyllic beach vibes. In January 1937, an exiled Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova sailed into the port city of Tampico, Mexico, along the Gulf of Mexico. They were greeted by Frida Kahlo, who had helped facilitate the couple’s asylum in Mexico with her then-husband Diego Rivera. Kahlo and Trotsky went on to have a brief affair, and she dedicated a self-portrait to him “with all love” later that year.

Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. photographed by Clarence Sinclair Bull for MGM Studios in 1929. The budding young stars got married that year and divorced in 1933.

Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanov

Grand Duchess Tatiana, one of Anastasia Romanov’s older sisters, at the beach in Crimea in 1916. Tatiana wrote in her diary that she was “terribly sad to leave” the place. Less than a year later, she and her family were put under house arrest back in Russia.

The Beatles

The Beatles’ February 1964 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show aired live from Miami’s Deauville Beach Resort. During the trip, they got to frolic all over Miami Beach (and even go water skiing).

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Winston Churchill

The bandmates were nearly 20 years too late to run into their compatriot Winston Churchill in Miami: He had visited back in 1946. While there, he received an honorary degree from the University of Miami and painted quite a lot. In 2016, one of his Miami landscapes sold for £192,000 (about $258,000 in today’s dollars).

Al Smith

Al Smith was another politician to put his feet up in Miami. The former New York governor vacationed there in early 1929 after losing spectacularly to Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election (Smith was the Democratic nominee, Hoover the Republican). The two actually met up in Miami to smoke cigars and shoot the breeze. Months later, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression arrived in full force.

Frank Sinatra

Frank Sinatra relaxes on the Roman beach Fregene in July 1956. As a New Jersey native, Sinatra was no stranger to beaches—he even met his first wife, Nancy Barbato, at the Jersey Shore during the summer of 1934.

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Mahatma Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi and company walking along Mumbai’s Juhu Beach in May 1944. On January 30, 1949, the first anniversary of Gandhi’s death, Juhu unveiled a bronze statue of him sitting in prayer along one of its main roads.

Maria Callas and Giovanni Battista Meneghini

Opera singer Maria Callas married Italian brick manufacturer Giovanni Battista Meneghini in 1949, when she was in her mid-twenties and he was in his fifties. Here they are on Lido, a Venetian barrier island, the following year. Callas left him for Aristotle Onassis in 1959. 

Jean Cocteau and Elsa Maxwell

French writer Jean Cocteau and American gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell were photographed in Lido two years prior during 1948’s Venice Film Festival. Cocteau was there for The Eagle With Two Heads (L’Aigle à deux têtes, in French), his own adaptation of his stage play of the same name. Other notable films at Venice that year included The Red Shoes, Orson Welles’s Macbeth, and Roberto Rossellini’s L’amore (partly based on a stage production written by Cocteau).

Tina Turner

Tina Turner celebrated New Year’s Eve in 1987 at Copacabana Beach in Brazil. Her Break Every Rule tour included a handful of concerts in Brazil in January 1988—including one at Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium that, with 180,000 attendees, currently holds the Guinness World Record for the highest attendance at a ticketed concert by a female artist.

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