Mavis Beacon was made up, but to many people, she felt real. (Olivia McKayla Ross, an investigator and associate producer on Seeking Mavis Beacon, told Mashable the narrative on the exact length of L’Esperance’s nails has fluctuated.) Due to her long nails, a decision was made not to show her hands, Abrams said. A new documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon, will examine the character’s legacy and attempt to locate L’Esperance, who fell out of the public eye in the mid-Nineties.Ībrams told Vice L’Esperance was paid a flat fee and posed for photos as Mavis over the course of one Sunday in Los Angeles’s business neighbourhood of Century City.

Incarnating Mavis was a Haitian-born woman called Renee L’Esperance, spotted behind a cosmetics counter at Saks Fifth Avenue by one of the men behind the company that sold Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Creating an avatar such as Mavis was a way of making the software more accessible, the interaction more natural. Mavis Beacon was a made-up character, conjured up at an age when consumers were still learning how to interact with computers.

And, often, people are shocked to learn that the woman who taught them that skill – a figure they remember from their childhood, someone they, in some cases, came to admire – never existed. Mavis comes up in fond remembrances on social media she is frequently referenced when the subject of typing is broached. To this day, adults who came of age in the Eighties and Nineties remember Mavis’s tutelage. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, an educational software program, launched in 1987 and quickly became a bestseller. A generation of adults learned how to type thanks to Mavis Beacon.

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