Marguerite Agniel

Marguerite Agniel (January 21, 1891 – c. 1971) was an American actress, dancer, and health and beauty advocate whose career spanned Broadway performance and prolific writing on physical culture. Born in 1891, she was one of six children of George Agniel and Ada Lescher Flowers. Her father, a farmer from Indiana, died in 1893, leaving her mother to raise the children alone. The Agniel family was of French-Jewish descent on her father's side and English on her mother's. She married in New York on March 21, 1917.

Agniel's Broadway career ran from 1916 to 1922. She appeared in The Amber Empress in 1916, a production featuring music by Zoel Parenteau, and later in Raymond Hitchcock's Pin Wheel in 1922.

Beyond the stage, Agniel built a reputation as a health and beauty authority in New York during the early twentieth century. She appeared in the November 15, 1926, issue of Vogue, demonstrating slimming exercises through floor stretches with postures corresponding to the yoga asanas Salabhasana, Supta Virasana, Sarvangasana, and Halasana. She subsequently contributed to Physical Culture magazine in 1927 and 1928, and in 1938 published a piece titled "The Mental Element in Our Physical Well-Being" in The Nudist, an American magazine, which combined nude yoga practice with instruction on breath awareness.

In 1931 Agniel published The Art of the Body: Rhythmic Exercise for Health and Beauty, illustrated predominantly with photographs of herself, making it one of the earliest works to bring together yoga and nudism. In the book's preface she credited her dance technique to Ruth St. Denis, who had herself followed the methods of François Delsarte, and identified her system of "aesthetic athletics" as rooted primarily in the physical culture work of Bernarr Macfadden. She named the sexologist Havelock Ellis and the musicologist Sigmund Spaeth as major influences on her thinking. The 1930s saw Agniel publish additional titles, including Body Sculpture in 1933 and Your Figure in 1936, the latter also issued that same year as Creating Body Beauty.

Agniel was the subject of a photographic print by Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins titled "Head and Hand," described as elegant though sharply ironic, which depicted Agniel holding a portrait sculpture of herself by Jo Davidson. In a 1936 letter to Louise Stevens Bryant, Ellis noted that Agniel's books were filled with illustrations, largely nude photographs of herself, and remarked on her skill at posing.