Behind the mask

film Mrs Doubtfire

DECEIT, complicity, and outrageous behaviour -- cross dressing in the

cinema comes into all three categories. There is, of course, nothing new

about actors cross dressing. Men pretending to be women are as old as

theatre itself, and only ended as a commonplace with the arrival of the

actress upon the scene a couple of hundred years ago.

The cinema, however, has always been a place where women's roles are

played by women, hence the interest aroused by the occasional male foray

into skirts. The latest to do so is, on all past cinematic evidence, the

hirsute comedian, Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire.

Not that cross dressing is confined to men. Women from time to time

cross dress, the most recent being Tilda Swinton. She makes something of

a habit of it having done so in the theatre as well. Her performance in

Orlando was a notable piece of impersonation, as was in Theatre of Blood

that of the distinguished and, unlike Ms Swinton, one-time television

sex goddess Diana Rigg.

Ms Swinton's task was easier in that she was required to be an

Elizabethan gallant, a breed whose sexuality was always slightly

suspect, and to metamorphose into a woman. Ms Rigg had to convince as a

man because it was one of the disguises she used to help her actor

manager father, Vincent Price, get his revenge on the critics who had

destroyed his career as a great Shakespearian.

Ms Swinton falls into the category of deceit because the role of the

male could as easily have been played by a man, whereas Ms Rigg's

performance falls into the category of complicity because we know,

although nobody in the film does, this is no man. In the outrageous

category is Marlene Dietrich's role in Morocco. Playing a cabaret

singer, she emerges in top hat, white tie, and tails, and plants a

lubricious kiss on the lips of a woman in the audience who is getting

too close to Gary Cooper, Marlene's man. There is no pretence Dietrich

is playing a man, she is simply dressing like one. Kissing the woman,

acting like a man is what makes the scene outrageous.

But it is men making up as, as opposed to making, women which is the

more interesting phenomenon. Let us take the categories in turn.

Deceit.

A classic example is the performance by Alistair Sim as the

headmistress of St Trinians, a role a woman could have played and one

did. In the last of the St Trinians series about the Great Train Robbery

the headmistress was played by Dora Bryan. Sim is a perfectly believable

woman, a grotesque perhaps, but a grande dame that character actresses

in the Hermione Gingold or Edith Evans mould would instantly recognise

as the kind of woman they could play. Patricia Routledge is today's

equivalent.

The point is Sim never winks at the camera or invites the audience to

share the joke. Similarly, in The Mouse That Roared, Peter Sellers plays

the Grand Duchess of Fenwick without for one moment implying he is other

than a very grande dame, an approached endorsed by the fact that in the

sequel, Mouse on the Moon, the role was played by a woman, Margaret

Rutherford. Had Sellers camped it up, done a standard man-in-drag act,

then pretty well any character actor male star could have followed in

the part.

THE most recent piece of deceit was the performance by Jaye Davidson

in The Crying Game in which he plays what the audience and his leading

man take, until let into the secret together, to be a girl. Davidson is

playing a boy who would be a girl, but playing him as a her without ever

giving away the fact he is a man.

It is not, however, a drag performance. There is no point to drag

unless that unanswered question lingers -- not unspoken because Danny La

Rue, one of the most celebrated drag artists, was always putting it to

his audiences -- What have I done with it? Ellen Barkin has played a

man, but as a woman in a film in which a male chauvinist is turned into

a woman. She did not play the male role, but had to play the female role

as if a man inhabited her body.

Complicity.

This is when we know, and the actor knows he is not a woman, but

nobody in the film does, even when this implies they are both blind and

very stupid. The greatest film in this category is Some Like It Hot, in

which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis disguise themselves as flappers and

join an all-girl band to escape the Mob. Neither looks remotely like a

woman and, when surrounded by the real women in the band, stand out like

sore thumbs.

The same is true of Dustin Hoofman's Tootsie. Small he may be in male

terms, but his whole physical shape, as was true of Lemmon and Curtis,

shouts man. He is broad where a broad is narrow and vice versa, no

matter how much he enjoys being, and we enjoy his being, a girl.

Williams' performance in Mrs Doubtfire is similarly a piece of

complicity. We share the joke. We marvel at the latex and the layers of

Max Factor which have transformed a chunky, butch little man into an

elderly, douce, allegedly Scottish nanny. But we do not for one moment

believe this is a woman. That is left to the people in the film, and

they too are flying in the face of all the evidence.

The other side of the coin is Julie Andrews in Victoria, Victoria as a

female singer who can only get work dressed as a boy. As a women she is

not known for being sexy, as a boy she is a woman dressed as a boy and

is still not sexy, although the plot requires James Garner to fall for

the boy woman and worry about his sexual orientation.

Silent stars were always dragging up. Chaplin did it a lot in his

silent shorts, simpering deliciously behind a strategically held muff

which concealed that little toothbrush moustache, and relying not on a

transforming make-up to suggest femininity, but on his essentially

feminine features in reality. He had dark eyes, a roguish smile, and was

slight enough in build to look female when confronted by the Heavy, who

was invariably immense.

A few performances escape categorisation, usually when the cross

dressing is merely a plot device. Michael Caine, for instance, appears

as a woman in Dressed to Kill. The deceit used by director Brian de

Palma is to imply that the serial murderer is a woman by giving us

discreet shots of the killer, only to reveal at the end that she was

Caine. But the killer woman role is thinly characterised, merely a

visual presence, the ''real'' character is the man Caine plays.

Outrageous behaviour.

A classic instance of this, Dietrich apart, is the performance by

Danny La Rue in his sole film, Our Miss Fred. He plays a drag artist

dragooned into spying in drag. The pretence that he is a real woman is

perfunctory. The joke is he is a man beneath the falsies.

The same is true of Bernard Bresslaw in Carry On Girls in which he is

required to dress up as a contestant in a beauty competition. He makes

an incredible woman, fools nobody in the audience or the cast for one

minute, except for the statutory short-sighted lecher, and is there only

to be the butt of jokes. The femininity is irrelevant. This is not drag

in the music hall or pub sense, nor even in the classic pantomime sense.

The same is true of Cary Grant required to dress up in a black wig and

female army uniform in I Was a Male War Bride. He is very funny, but he

is not playing a woman, he is playing a big butch man dressed up.

Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle in Nuns on the Run also remained men in

habits rather than sisters, while in Victoria, Victoria Robert Preston's

stint in drag is just that, a classic instance of outrageous behaviour.

Why do male actors do it?

There are the demands of a screenplay, which is fine in situations

like Grant finds himself in I Was A Male War Bride or Bing Crosby and

Bob Hope kept doing in more than just the Road movies. (I have a

horrific memory of Bing in his latter years as the dean of some college

turning up at the senior prom in a crinoline and getting mashed.)

Sometimes they are joking when they do it.

Why should an actor do it for real? One answer is probably that given

by the great Hardy Amies recently when asked why it was mostly

homosexual men who became great dress designers. He said this was

because they liked to wear frocks themselves, hastily adding that in his

case this was not true.

Some actors enjoy the technical challenge, which is why inflated

claims can be made for a performance as they were in the case of

Tootsie.

Sometimes the technical challenge is real, as was the case with Tilda

Swinton's impersonation of Orlando. Sometimes it is a case of men taking

their revenge on the women in their lives by playing a truly awful woman

and softening the savagery of what they are doing with the excuse that

no woman is really like that so they can only be joking, honest. But

they're not.

The fact is that they are only doing what men actors have been doing

since the first mask was donned in the first arena in the first play by

the first playwright, whatever that was and wherever it was. They are

just going Back to Basics.