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Olive Atkinson (fl. 1912 to 1930) was an English chorus girl, actress and model who worked largely in musical theatre

Life
English by birth, Atkinson as a girl lived in Berlin, where she became one of "Kaufmann's Cycling Troupe" at the Winter Gardens. Before the Great War, while still in Berlin, she won a beauty competition for a large prize organized by Charles B. Cochran, later a theatrical impresario, then the director of the Kurfürstendamm roller-skating rink. The competition was decided by audience voting, and few people realized Atkinson was English. The outcome was unpopular and was even criticized by the German press, so that Cochran never again managed to draw big crowds to his rink.

Atkinson moved to London before the outbreak of the war, as did Cochran, and as he established himself as a theatrical producer he found her work. In 1916, she appeared in a double-page spread of photographs in The Tatler, wearing leopard skins, under the headline Winner of a Continental Beauty Prize, a Former Trick Cyclist, and Now Delighting the Eye in "Half-Past Eight". In the Cochran musical Houp La! (November 1916 to February 1917), she played a Trapeze Artist, and later in 1917 had a place in the chorus of Cochran's The Better 'Ole at the New Oxford Theatre.

Following the First World War, Atkinson's face was widely used in advertisements for Ven-Yusa Face Cream, one of which boasted: "Ladies of title and beautiful actresses use exclusively. It is part of their toilet, morning, noon, and night. Miss Olive Atkinson, of the London Comedy Theatre (whose portrait is given above) says she has never known a cream 'so fragrant and refreshing'".

Atkinson appeared in the silent film Not Guilty (1919) as 'Minnie Day'. In 1921, she was touring with Rob Duncan as “ Rob Duncan and Olive Atkinson, musical entertainers“

In 1930, Atkinson asked Cochran for the address of Tom Woottwell on behalf of Edmée Owen (Lady Owen), who had written to her from prison. Owen was Edmee Dormeuil, a French actress, said to be aged 34 in August 1930, who had married Theodore Charles Owen (knighted 1926, died 1927 aged seventy). In 1930 his widow shot Mme Gastaud, the wife of her doctor, with whom she was in love, but while seriously injured Mme Gastaud survived. Gastaud was a specialist in beauty treatment. Owen, reported to be the daughter of a French naval officer, later of a French army officer, served two years of a five-year sentence before being pardoned.