11 Must-See Movies Featuring Transgender Characters
Will Best Actor Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne earn a return trip to the podium for his starring role in "The Danish Girl?" It's certainly possible. After all, playing a transgender character, often impresses the Academy -- as the gallery here shows.
'The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' (1994)
Terence Stamp brings a sense of lived-in dignity to Bernadette, a middle-aged transgender performer working with two younger drag queens in a touring lip-synch act. Throughout the film, she proves herself a real lady, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, especially during her sweet courtship of a genteel mechanic named Bob.
'Albert Nobbs" (2011)
Glenn Close is a Victorian-era Dublin hotel waiter who lives in fear that someone will discover his sexual identity. But then Albert meets another transgender man, Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), one who lives openly with a woman and without any of Albert's repression and fear. Close is remarkable in the part, but McTeer even more so. Both earned Oscar nominations.
'Boys Don't Cry' (1999)
Hilary Swank won her first Oscar for this docudrama about Brandon Teena, a transgender Midwesterner with a girlfriend, who paid a horrible price when resentful small-town locals discovered that he was born Teena Brandon. Swank's performance is full of joy, humor, and desperate sorrow.
'The Crying Game' (1992)
Neil Jordan's clever misdirection meant that many viewers were as shocked as fugitive IRA soldier Fergus (Stephen Rea) when he discovered that new lover Dil (Jaye Davidson) was still anatomically male. (It helped that Davidson was an unknown actor with an ambiguous first name.) As it turns out, Dil has still more surprises tucked away, thanks to Davidson's cagey, Oscar-nominated performance.
'Dallas Buyers Club' (2013)
Jared Leto won an Oscar playing Rayon, who helps Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) bypass foot-dragging doctors to distribute hard-to-get medicines to AIDS patients in the early days of the epidemic. Unrecognizable in the role, Leto dropped 30 pounds, waxed his entire body, and stayed in character even when cameras weren't rolling.
'Dog Day Afternoon' (1975)
In Sidney Lumet's celebrated dramedy, the reason behind Sonny's (Al Pacino) bank-robbery-turned-hostage-standoff is that he wants to pay for a sex-change operation for his lover, Leon. A pre-"Princess Bride" Chris Sarandon earned an Oscar nod for his matter-of-fact performance as Leon; the character is no more or less absurd than anything else in this far-fetched but based-in-fact shaggy dog tale.
'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' (2001)
John Cameron Mitchell adapted his Off-Broadway rock musical about a German transgender rock singer, in which he also plays the title role. Hedwig embodies a lot of interesting ideas about love, sex, Platonic idealism, Cold War politics, and music, but she's also wickedly funny. By the way, the Angry Inch isn't just the name of her band; it's also what was left after Hedwig's botched sex-change operation.
'Kiss of the Spider Woman' (1985)
William Hurt won an Oscar as Molina, a citizen of an unnamed Latin American country, whose sexual identity gets him locked in a cell with a political revolutionary, Valentin (Raul Julia). Passing the time by living in a fantasy realm inspired by romantic old movies, Molina draws Valentin into his world, where issues of morals, politics, and desire become elusive.
'M. Butterfly' (1993)
With this romantic drama, director David Cronenberg began to apply his fascination with the malleability of the human body to a genre other than horror. Based on David Henry Hwang's play, this loosely-based-in-fact tale stars John Lone as Chinese opera performer Song Liling, whose two-decade romance with a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) proves the latter's undoing.
'Transamerica' (2005)
Made at the height of Felicity Huffman's "Desperate Housewives" fame, this road-trip drama casts her in a very different role as newly-trans Bree, who discovers a runaway son she never knew about. Huffman earned an Academy Award nomination for her alternately funny and serious performance.
'The World According to Garp' (1982)
One of John Lithgow's first major movie roles came in this John Irving adaptation as Roberta Muldoon, a retired football player who's the most compassionate and reasonable person in a film full of extreme characters. One of the first fully sympathetic trans characters in a mainstream Hollywood movie, Roberta earned Lithgow an Academy Award nomination.
