- Mata Hari is Malay for "Eye of Dawn"
- No one claimed her body after her execution. Her corpse was taken to a medical school to be used by students for study.
- Shared her birthday with her father's sister, Minke.
- Spoke Dutch, German, English, French, and Malay, the native tongue of Java.
- Debuted her exotic dance act as "Mata Hari" at the Musée Guimet (Paris) on March 13, 1905. She was an overnight sensation, however, by 1910, a myriad of imitators had arisen, and she was held in disdain by critics and cultural institutions as a dancer who did not know how to dance. She performed her act for the final time exactly 10 years later, March 13, 1915.
- Was watched by British secret government agency MI5 from 1915-1917. However, her files note there was never any evidence that she passed on anything of military importance to German intelligence.
- Has a permanent exhibit at the Fries Museum (Leeuwarden, The Netherlands). In the exhibit are two personal scrapbooks and an oriental rug embroidered with the footsteps of her fan dance.
- Eldest of 4 children.
- Her first name, Margaretha, came from her paternal grandmother; her middle name, Geertruida, came from her paternal great-grandmother.
- Her husband Rudolph MacLeod was a son of Baroness Dina Louisa Sweerts de Landas, whose cousin, Baroness Ella Van Heemstra, was the mother of Audrey Hepburn. He died in 1928.
- Painfully self-conscious of her small bosom at a time when full-figured women were the ideal, she would not remove the breast cups she wore in her act before intimacy, telling lovers that her ex-husband bit her nipples off in a fit of brutality.
- Two children: Norman John (30 January 1897 - 28 June 1899) and Jeanne Louise MacLeod (2 May 1898 - 10 August 1919)
- It was claimed at her trail that her activities caused the deaths of 50,000 Allied soldiers. However, historian Wesley Wark stated to the Toronto Star in a 2014 interview that she was made a scapegoat for French military failures. Likewise, historian Julie Wheelwright stated in the same interview: "She really did not pass on anything that you couldn't find in the local newspapers in Spain". She was recruited in 1916 by agents from the Deuxième Bureau, who promised she would be allowed to visit her wounded lover, Russian Expeditionary Force Captain Vadim Maslov, at the front only if she agreed to seduce Crown Prince Hohenzollern; the French believed mistakenly that he was a commander in his father's army. She would later take money from German intelligence, which would reveal her to the French deliberately as a double-agent because the intel she was supplying was deemed to be worthless. Maslov would later turn against her at her trial, stating that he didn't care if she was convicted or not.
- After her arrest, at least half a dozen of her former lovers hatched absurd schemes to save her life.
- Shared her birthday with her paternal aunt, Minke.
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