Mabel Stark was known as Mistress of the Tigers, so adept was she at training the big cats. Born in 1889 into squalor, Stark raised her station in life by learning to tame tigers; by the 1920s she was renowned in her field, travelling throughout the U.S. with the circus. In Mabel Mabel Tiger Trainer, director Leslie Zemeckis give us a peak into Stark’s fascinating world that included several marriages, fame, and multiple maulings by the tigers to which she was so devoted. Her love for the animals ran so deep, in fact that despite having “had my arms broken, my legs broken, part of a deltoid muscle torn out of my right shoulder, a plate in my head, my elbow is gone out of my right arm…no flesh on my legs,” Stark stated her only wish was “to be killed by my animals.”