JULIAN ELTINGE

Julian Eltinge was a legendary cross dresser ("drag queen") and actor from the 1900s to the 1940s. Who was Julian Eltinge? Forgotten today except by historians, he was born in Massachusetts in 1881, and as a young child he enjoyed performing dressed as a female. When he was 23 he performed in a Broadway musical (by Jerome Kern) as a man impersonating a woman, and his great success led to a major career in vaudeville. He would perform a series of singing and dancing acts, with many costume changes, and audiences did not see him as a man pretending to me a woman, but they saw him as a woman! In fact, he would sometimes be billed simply as "Eltinge", so the audience would be in doubt as to his gender throughout the show, and in his final number he would remove his wig to reveal he was a man (often to gasps from the audience). This was recreated in the various versions of the play and movie Victor/Victoria. Eltinge toured the United States and Europe, and he gave a command performance for King Edward VII of England at Windsor Castle! In 1914 Julian Eltinge made the first of a dozen movies in the course of a decade, and movie paper of any kind from any of these movies is beyond rare! The one-sheet poster from "The Widow's Might", which we auctioned in 2021 for $2,827, is not only the ONLY poster from any of Eltinge's movies we have ever auctioned, but we also searched the Internet and could not find any other posters. This is especially odd given that Eltinge made at least most of his movies for Paramount Pictures, which was the number one studio in the world at this time! Julian Eltinge paved the way for much later drag performers including Divine, Charles Pierce, Craig Russell, Jim Bailey and RuPaul. Eltinge kept his private life extremely secret, and while most historians assume he was surely gay, actress Ruth Gordon said he was "as virile as anybody is virile". He adopted a supermasculine facade in public (in an attempt to dispel rumors), and one critic described him as "ambisextrous". He acquired much wealth, and lived alone in a mansion, and when he passed away in 1940, his sole heir was his 79 year old mother.