The nurse, who accidentally became famous after an iconic World War II photograph captured her being kissed by an US sailor in Times Square, has died at the age of 91.
Edith Shain was clicked by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1945 when an unknown American soldier, celebrating US’ victory over Japan, locked her in a passionate embrace and kissed her.
The photo was published in Life magazine and remains one of the most memorable pictures ever clicked. Shain died at her home in Los Angeles of liver cancer on Sunday.
She was working at a hospital in New York when the photo was taken on August 14, 1945. The photo shows a sailor in a uniform kissing a nurse in a white uniform who is bent backwards in an embrace.
“I went from Doctors Hospital to Times Square that day because the war was over, and where else does a New Yorker go?” said Shain, at Victory Day parade in 2008, as quoted by the Huffington Post.
“And this guy grabbed me and we kissed, and then I turned one way and he turned the other. There was no way to know who he was, but I didn’t mind because he was someone who had fought for me,” she added.
In 1980, Shain recalled, she wrote a letter to Life, identifying herself as the woman in the nurse’s uniform, the Huffington Post reported. Eisenstaedt wrote back and later visited her in California and gave her a copy of the photo.
But Eisenstaedt, who died in 1995, was never sure that Shain was the woman in the photo, according Bbbi Baker Burrows, an editor of the Life magazine.
The identity of the sailor in the picture remains unknown and Shain passed away without ever really knowing for sure who planted the kiss on her, according to the New York Daily News.
“In retrospect, I should have said, ‘Hey, wait a minute!” and gotten his name and number, Shain told the Daily News in 2008.
“She is survived by three sons, six grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren — and an indelible image that lives on,” the newspaper said.