Playing the Other Gender

“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls/ It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world/ except for Lola.” – Lola, The Kinks

You can probably think of a couple dozen movies where a character masqueraded as the opposite sex – Yentl, Tootsie, Just One of the Guys, Shakespeare in Love, etc.  This category isn’t about those kinds of “playing the other gender” movies.  In those cases the character was the same gender as the actor/actress, and their character was pretending to be the other gender.

No, this category is for those rare movies where an actor/actress played a character who was actually a different gender.  An example is the first movie I will review – 1982’s The Year of Living Dangerously.  Actress Linda Hunt played a Eurasian man…and won an Oscar for it.  She is the only actor/actress in this category to do so, although in my opinion there is another who also deserved an Oscar, as you will see when I get to that movie’s review.

As I post the reviews, I will come back and add links here for those posts:

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
Transamerica (2005)
Hairspray (2007)
St. Trinian's (2007)
XXY (2007)

On to the reviews…