- Koopman was an archaeologist and international fashion model who worked in Paris prior to World War II.
- During WWII she became a war hero and served as a spy for the Italian Resistance.
- Koopman left Java in 1920 to attend a boarding school in the Netherlands where she developed a talent for languages and became fluent in English, French, German and Italian. After a year at an English finishing school, she moved to Paris to work as a haute couture model.
- She survived the war and in later life she helped establish the Hanover Gallery as one of the most influential art galleries in Europe in the 1950's.
- Throughout her life Toto Koopman exhibited a free spirit, unapologetically scandalous and riveting, she was openly bi-tracial and bi-sexual, in a time when other celebrities like movie star Merle Oberon felt the need to conceal a multi-ethnic background by pretending that her dark-skinned, Anglo-Indian mother, who was living with her, was her maid.
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