Lili Elbe

Lili Ilse Elvenes, better known as Lili Elbe (28 December 1882 – 13 September 1931), was a Danish transgender woman and one of the first identifiable recipients of sex reassignment surgery. Elbe was born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener and was a successful artist under that name. She also presented as Lili (sometimes spelled Lily) and was publicly introduced as Einar's sister. After transitioning, however, she made a legal name change to Lili Ilse Elvenes and stopped painting.

Elbe's year of birth is sometimes stated as 1886. This appears to be from a book about her, which has some facts changed to protect the identities of the persons involved. Factual references to the life of Elbe's wife Gerda Gottlieb indicate that the 1882 date is correct since they clearly married while at college in 1904. It is highly likely that Elbe was an intersex person, though it is disputed by some.

Her autobiography Man into Woman, was published in 1933.

Marriage and modelling

Elbe met Gerda Gottlieb at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and they married in 1904, when Gottlieb was 18 and Wegener was 22. The two of them worked as illustrators, with Elbe specializing in landscape paintings, while Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. They both traveled through Italy and France, eventually settling in Paris in 1912, where Elbe could live openly as a woman, and Gottlieb a lesbian. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (the Artists Fall Exhibition), at the Vejle Art Museum, and in the Saloon and Salon d'Automme in Paris. She is represented at Vejle Art Museum in Denmark.

The Danish Girl

The Danish Girl is a novel by American writer David Ebershoff, published in 2000 by the Viking Press in the United States and Allen & Unwin in Australia.

Summary

The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery.

The Danish Girl, as Ebershoff stated, does not try to tell a true story. He has not only imagined most of what he wrote about Elbe's inner life, but he has also fabricated all of the other characters in the book, most important among them Wegener's blue-blooded American-born wife, Greta Waud, who like Ebershoff comes from Pasadena, California. The real Gerda Wegener was Danish, but in the novel her name was changed to Greta to please the American audience.

Awards

The Danish Girl won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award. It was also a finalist for the Tiptree Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, and an American Library Association Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Eddie Redmayne

Edward John David Redmayne, OBE (/ˈrɛdmeɪn/; born 6 January 1982) known as Eddie Redmayne, is an English actor, model and singer. He started his professional career in both theatre and television roles in the early 2000s and then made his film debut, Like Minds, in 2006. He has since appeared in films such as The Good Shepherd (2006), Savage Grace (2007), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), My Week with Marilyn (2011), Les Misérables (2012), The Theory of Everything (2014), Jupiter Ascending (2015), and The Danish Girl (2015).

Redmayne received acclaim for his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, the BAFTA Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2015, he received further critical acclaim for his portrayal of Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of sex reassignment surgery, in The Danish Girl. For his performance, he received nominations for his second Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor. He has continued to perform in theatre, most notably in the play Red (2010), on Broadway, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play.

Gerda Wegener

Gerda Marie Fredrikke Gottlieb (15 March 1886 – 28 July 1940) was a Danish fine-artist, illustrator and painter best known for erotica. Her artwork largely contains images of fashionable women in the style of art nouveau and later art deco.

Early life

Gottlieb grew up in the provinces, near the city of Grenaa, the daughter of Justine (née Østerberg) and Emil Gottlieb, a vicar in the Catholic church. Her father had Huguenot ancestry and her family was conservative. She had three siblings but was the only child to live to adulthood. She showed artistic talent at a young age and began training. Her family moved to Hobro and later she moved to Copenhagen to pursue her education at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Career

Her big break as an artist came just after graduating from the Academy in 1907 and 1908 when she won a drawing contest put on by the Politiken newspaper. She then was the center of a controversy called the Peasant Painter Dispute after one of her works, a portrait of Ellen von Kohl, was rejected for exhibitions due to the style of the piece.

Lili

Lili is a 1953 American film released by MGM. It stars Leslie Caron as a touchingly naïve French girl, whose emotional relationship with a carnival puppeteer is conducted through the medium of four puppets. The screenplay by Helen Deutsch was adapted from "The Man Who Hated People", a short story by Paul Gallico which appeared in the October 28, 1950, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

It won the Academy Award for Best Music, and was also entered into the 1953 Cannes Film Festival.

Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer's rendition of "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo" was released as a single and became a minor hit, reaching number 30 on the pop music charts.

Following the film's success, Gallico expanded his story into a 1954 novella entitled The Love of Seven Dolls. The film was adapted for the stage under the title Carnival! (1961).

Plot