Jeanne Calment was born in Arles, France, in 1875 and defied every piece of medical advice there was.
She smoked for nearly a century and only gave up cigarettes at 117, not because she was worried about her health, but because she could no longer see well enough to light one. She drank wine every day, ate nearly a kilo of chocolate a week, and used olive oil both in her meals and on her skin.
Even so, she continued riding a bicycle until she was 100 and kept her sense of humor intact well into her 110s.
She died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days, and to this day remains the longest-lived person ever documented in history. Her case even sparked a scientific controversy: some Russian researchers suggested that it was actually her daughter who had assumed her identity, although later studies in France and Switzerland completely ruled out that theory.
