Several films based on the 1892 United Kingdom play Charley's Aunt by Brandon Thomas.Twelfth Night: Or What You Will (1996) – a British film.Twelfth Night (1986) – an Australian film.Twelfth Night (1933) – an American film, the first film made by Orson Welles.Films based on the 1601 or 1602 play Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare.Films based on the 1599 or 1600 play As You Like It by William Shakespeare.Movies that feature cross-dressing as a central plot element: Doubtfire.ĭame Edna was an elderly drag queen with "wisteria-colored hair" who did international chat shows in the 1990s. Robin Williams played a divorced father who dressed as a nanny to be with his children in the 1993 comedy Mrs. In The Drew Carey Show, Drew's brother, Steve Carey, is a cross-dresser. Frank 'n' Furter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show wore nothing but women's clothing the entire film/play. Butterfly focuses on a love affair between a French diplomat and a male Beijing opera singer who plays dan, or female, roles.ĭr. The film is a remake of Viktor und Viktoria, a German film of 1933.ĭavid Henry Hwang's 1988 play M. In Blake Edwards's 1982 musical comedy film Victor Victoria, Victoria Grant, a struggling soprano, is unable to find work but she finds success when she becomes "Count Victor Grazinski", a female impersonator. The film is a remake of a 1935 French movie, Fanfare of Love, from the story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, which was itself remade in 1951 by German director Kurt Hoffmann as Fanfares of Love. In Some Like It Hot (1959), two struggling musicians have to dress as women to escape the ire of gangsters. JSTOR ( April 2018) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.įind sources: "Cross-dressing in film and television" – news
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This section needs additional citations for verification. Cross-gender acting, on the other hand, refers to actors or actresses portraying a character of the opposite gender. One early exception was Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Murder!, where the murderer is a transvestite who wears particularly frilly dresses and petticoats. Only in recent decades have there been dramatic films which included cross-dressing, possibly because of strict censorship of American films until the mid-1960s. The tradition has continued for many years, usually played for laughs. The Three Stooges, especially Curly ( Jerry Howard), sometimes appeared in drag in their short films.
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Even the beefy American actor Wallace Beery appeared in a series of silent films as a Swedish woman.
Both Chaplin and Laurel occasionally dressed as women in their films. Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel brought the tradition from the English music halls when they came to America with Fred Karno's comedy troupe in 1910. Cross-dressing in film has followed a long history of female impersonation on English stage, and made its appearance in the early days of the silent films.