JARED Leto won an Oscar best supporting actor trophy for playing a transgender in “Dallas Buyers Club.”
Most film roles are played by gender-appropriate actors—like Scarlett O’Hara being portrayed by Vivien Leigh and Rhett Butler being vivified by Clark Gable.
Once in an idiosyncratic while, however, genders are creatively tweaked, either to suit a plot twist or to provide fresh insights into matters of sensuality and sexuality.
Then, there is, too, the need to represent the 10 or 15 percent of the population that’s gay or variously gender-varied.
In international films, pioneering gender-tweaking performances included some roles essayed by Greta Garbo, Alec Guinness (“The Lavender Hill Mob”), Barbara Stanwyck and Lotte Lenya.
Later, Robin Williams scored a hit at the box office with “Mrs. Doubtfire,” in which he played an estranged dad who had to cross-dress to keep in touch with his children. For his part, Dustin Hoffman played a jobless actor who assumed a mature female character so he could find employment, in “Tootsie.” More: Barbra Streisand passed herself off as a young male student in “Yentl.” Ditto for Amanda Bynes in “She’s the Man.”
Tom Hanks swished and dished as an ersatz woman in “Bosom Buddies” on TV.
Gwyneth Paltrow believably “guyed” it up in “Shakespeare in Love,” and even won an Oscar for her effective ruse.
Then, there’s Neil Patrick Harris in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on Broadway, Jared Leto in “Dallas Buyers Club” on the big screen, and Lady Gaga portraying her male alter ego “Jo Calderone” onstage.
Johnny Depp put on lingerie and heels as a transvestite movie director in “Ed Wood.” Hilary Swank won an Academy honor for her depiction in “Boys Don’t Cry,” of a transgendered man, Brandon Teena.
ON THE LOCAL scene, singer-actor Aiza Seguerra bends gender rules.
In “Bad Education,” Gael Garcia Bernal played a drug-addicted “woman.” In “Taking Woodstock,” Liev Schreiber portrayed a gay cross-dresser. In “Transamerica,” Felicity Huffman was cast as a man about to undergo gender-reassignment surgery when he found out that he had fathered a son (confusing!).
Jaye Davidson played a transsexual in “The Crying Game.” John Travolta was a really huge woman, Edna Turnblad, in the hit movie musical “Hairspray.” And trumping everybody else, Cate Blanchett wowed viewers and her thespic colleagues alike as a dead-ringer for Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There!”
On the local TV-film scene, of course, the stellar cross-dressers and/or gender-benders include Vice Ganda, Aiza Seguerra, Charice Pempengco, and all of Nora Aunor’s scores of gay devotees and impersonators. Interestingly, even certified macho men like Ronaldo Valdez, Eddie Garcia, Vic Vargas, Gardo Versoza, Gabby Eigenmann and the late Dolphy and Dindo Fernando have gone “gloriously” gay on the big and/or small screens.
Why do they do it? Because it’s a really tough thespic challenge that stretches their limits as performers. And, less solemnly, because it’s fun, exhilarating—and liberating!