The Danish Girl actors Eddie Redmayne, left and Alicia Vikander, alongside British director Tom Hooper.
Photograph: CLAUDIO ONORATI

Danish Girl director Tom Hooper: film industry has 'problem' with transgender actors

Director of film starring Eddie Redmayne, about Danish transgender pioneer Lili Elbe, says that ‘access to roles’ is key to progress

The film industry has a “problem” with transgender actors, with many unable to secure roles despite a “huge pool of talent”, according to film director Tom Hooper, whose latest film The Danish Girl – starring Eddie Redmayne as a pioneering recipient of gender-reassignment surgery – receives its world premiere at the Venice film festival.

Gerda and Einar Wegener in front of Gerda's painting Sur la route d'Anacapri at an exhibition in 1924.
Photograph: The Royal Library, Denmark

Gerda Wegener: 'The Lady Gaga of the 1920s'

The Danish Girl tells the story of the painter Einar Wegener, who had the world’s first gender-reassignment surgery and became Lili Elbe. But his wife Gerda had a fascinating life and career of her own


Helen Russell
Monday 28 September 2015 18.58 BST

E

ddie Redmayne is already being Oscar-tipped for his latest role in Tom Hooper’s biopic, The Danish Girl – the story of the painter Einar Wegener, who underwent the world’s first gender-reassignment operation to become Lili Elbe. But there was another woman behind Einar and Lili.

In The Danish Girl, Wegener’s wife, Gerda, a talented artist, is played by 26-year-old Swede Alicia Vikander, who very nearly steals the show as her partner’s devoted supporter. In real life, the story is not dissimilar. Gerda married Einar in 1904 and went on to become the nation’s most prominent exponent of art deco, pioneering the bending of gender boundaries and rethinking the female gaze.

The Danish Girl review – chocolate-box charm from Eddie Redmayne

This fictionalised biopic of pioneering transgender artist Lili Elbe is well made and sympathetic, if a little too tasteful


Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 31 December 2015 19.00 GMT

The title is ambiguous, applying to either of its lead characters, but in both cases it should be The Danish Woman, surely? This is the fictionalised reimagining of the story of Lili Elbe, formerly Einar Wegener, the pioneering transgender artist from Denmark who, in 1930, was one of the first people to undertake sex reassignment surgery. Screenwriter Lucinda Coxon has adapted David Ebershoff’s 2000 novel based on Elbe’s life, and Tom Hooper directs with the same accomplishment and flair he brought to The King’s Speech, the same eye for sartorial elegance – Eddie Redmayne’s male suits make him look an elfin Prince of Wales. There is the same Pygmalion trope of remedial transformation.

Redmayne is Lili and Alicia Vikander plays Gerda, the fellow artist who is married to Einar (as he is originally). At first, Gerda skittishly goes along with their secret erotic game of Einar dressing in her clothes as Lili, and even partly creates this persona by painting portraits of this mysterious woman, which become the talk of the art world. But Gerda must deal with growing feelings of loneliness and abandonment.