Camilla (given name)

Look up Camilla in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Look up Camille in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Camilla is a feminine given name. The French variant Camille may be either masculine or feminine.

It ultimately originates as the feminine of camillus, a term for a youth serving as acolyte in the ritual of ancient Roman religion, which may ultimately be of Etruscan origin. Camillus came to be used as a cognomen in Rome, and Camilla would be the feminine form of this cognomen from a period when cognomina had become hereditary clan names. The most notable bearer of this name in Roman history is Marcus Furius Camillus (ca. 446 – 365 BC), who according to Livy and Plutarch, triumphed four times, was five times dictator, and was honoured with the title of "Second Founder of Rome". In the Aeneid, Camilla was the name of a princess of the Volsci who was given as a servant to the goddess Diana and raised as a "warrior virgin" of the Amazon type.

In the English-speaking world, the name was popularized Fanny Burney's novel Camilla of 1796. The form Camille was later associated with the heroine of Dumas' The Lady of the Camellias (1848), which served as the basis for Verdi's opera La Traviata and several films. In Dumas' novel, Camille is not the given name of the heroine; this name was applied to her in derived works in the English-speaking world, presumably due to the similarity in sound to the floral name Camellia (which was coined by Linnaeus (1753) after the name of the Czech Jesuit missionary Georg Joseph Kamel). The name Camille was given to the heroine as early as in a silent film of 1915, but it became widely-known (and led to an increased popularity of the given name in the United States) with Greta Garbo's Camille of 1936.

Hypocorisms of the name include Milly, Millie, Mille.

List of people with the given name Camilla

• Camilla Collett (1813–1895), Norwegian feminist.
• Camilla Odhnoff (1928–2013), Swedish politician
• Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall (b. 1947), wife of Charles, Prince of Wales
• Camilla Henemark (b. 1964), Swedish singer
• Camilla Cavendish (b. 1968), columnist for the Times of London.
• Camilla Dallerup (b. 1974), British based Danish ballroom dancer
• Camilla D'Errico, Italian-Canadian visual artist
• Camilla Belle (b. 1986), American actress
• Camilla Marie Beeput (b. 1984), British singer
• Camila Giorgi (b. 1991), Italian tennis player

People with the given name Camille

Men

• Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794, a French journalist and revolutionary
• Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), a French painter
• Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), a French impressionist painter
• Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921), French composer
• Camille Jordan (born 1838), a French mathematician
• Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), a French astronomer and author
• Camille Sée (1847–1919), a French politician
• Camille Chamoun (1900–1987), a former president of Lebanon
• Camille Huard (born 1951), a French-Canadian boxer
• Camille Lacourt (born 1985), a French swimmer

Women

• Camille Claudel (1864–1943), a French female sculptor
• Camille Paglia (born 1947), an American author
• Camille Dalmais (born 1978), a French singer and musician, better known as Camille
• Camille Anderson (born 1981), an American actress and model
• Camille O'Sullivan (born 1970), a French-Irish cabaret singer traveling with the Spiegeltent
• Camille Pin (born 1981), a French tennis player
• Camille Munro (born 1991), Miss World Canada winner
• Camille Kitt, actress and identical twin of Kennerly Kitt. Also known as The "Harp Twins."
• Camille De Pazzis, a French actress
• Camille Catala, a French football player

Fictional characters

• Greta Garbo's Camille (1936)
• Camilla (muppet), the Muppet
• Princess Camille, protagonist of Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland
• Camille, the main villainess in Power Rangers Jungle Fury
• Camille Montes, the lead Bond girl in the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace
• Camille, a pseudonym used by Prince during the late 1980s and early 1990s
• Camille Leon, a fictional shapeshifting character from Kim Possible portrayed by Ashley Tisdale
• Camille Saroyan, character of the TV series Bones
• Camille the Wood Elf, Character of Troll Tales
• Camilla (Castlevania), one of Dracula's servants in the Castlevania series

References

See also

• Camilla (disambiguation)

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