Too complex to try to sort out. I’m limiting discussion to clear-cut traditional male or female roles and actors. Otherwise this discussion will get hijacked into the hyperspace of gender identity and prejudices.
Agreed, but others have already introduced TV shows (as did I, with Peter Pan; not to mention theatrical representations). I’m flexible at least in this way.
I didn’t know that was Meryl Streep until reading your post. Most impressive!
If theatrical shorts count, the Three Stooges short Self Made Maids portrays Moe, Larry, and Shemp as Moella, Larraine, and Shempetta, and marries them off to…Moe, Larry, and Shemp.
The Stooges in drag??? Ban them!!! Ban them now!!!
In the film Liquid Sky, actress Anne Carlisle played the female lead and the male lead.
According to IMDb,
Anne Carlisle playing dual role was not originally planned on pre-production. The actor who was supposed to play the character of Jimmy fell out of the project.
I’d completely forgotten that one. Saw it ages ago in an art cinema.
Don’t feel bad, I was thinking of this answer before I finished reading the tittle. Mostly surprised the OP missed it.
This one is a bit of a stretch. In the 1998 Godzilla, the monster is female and pregnant. The roar used in that film is a mix of many sounds, but several of them were male voices.
But there’s nothing in the movie to indicate Greedo is male, or if Rodians even have 2 sexes.
In “Miller’s Crossing”, Albert Finney played the maid in the ladies room when Gabriel Byrne came charging in:
Crossing herself at the beginning.
Though that was more of a gag than a considered choice by the director.
In Constantine, Tilda Swinton was Gabriel: a not entirely binary archangel.
Yet another Tilda Swinton role…one of the three characters she played in the remake of Suspiria was Dr. Josef Klemperer, though she was credited as “Lutz Ebersdorf”).
Ahem. When I saw the thread title, I thought, surely I will be able to post this very obscure movie and even more obscure role as an instance. But nooooo, it had to be the first one on your list.
While I’m here, I have occasionally wondered whether Neil Dudgeon (who took over Midsomer Murders from John Nettles) is a descendant or at any rate related to the late Elspeth. His IMDB biography is very sparse.
If you’ll accept a TV series, then how about UK sitcom The New Statesman about a corrupt politician.
Rowena Cooper (a woman) played Norman Bormann (a man). In the final episode of Season 1, he transitioned to become Norma Bormann, still played by Rowena Cooper (a cis woman) , playing a biologically male trans woman.
I recently saw an episode of the show in which Max Baer, Jr. played Jethro and his twin sister, Jethrine. It turns out that he played the character in 11 first-season episodes, but the character was voiced by a woman (Linda Kaye Henning, the show creator’s daughter, who went on to play Betty Jo Bradley in Petticoat Junction).
Well, imagine MY surprise that Roderick Femm was writing to me. I don’t think I’ve encountered you before on the Board. Hi.
The Old Dark House was neve an obscure movie to me, in that Forrest J. Ackerman featured pictures from it in every few issues of his Famous Monsters of Filmland (which I was a devoted reader of). This despite the fact that the film wasn’t part of the “Shock!” package of horror films in the early 1960s (and was, indeed, thought to be a “lost film” then). So as soon as I saw that it was available on DVD I bought it, and have watched a few times – one of them pretty recently. So it’s part of the reason I started this thread.
One of the things that virtually no one appreciated about the Roland Emmerich Godzilla was that it was essentuially a remake of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the very first 1950s Monster Movie, and the one that introduced the tropes. There had been Monster On THe Loose in the City movies before, but this is the one that tied it to radiation and the atomic bomb, gave us the Brave Handsome Scientist sand the Beautiful Assistant and the Eccentric Older Scientist, the Military trying to stop the Creature but being unable to do so, and the Crazy Idea to get rid of it, but they only have One Shot.
In order to do this, they had to answer a lot of questions, which the script does, briliantly. Like “Why can’t the Military Destroy it?” (Answer – it’s infected with a prehistoric disease, and it’s in its blood, and it’s airborne. Blast the Creature into bits and you contaminate the city).
Another question was – why the hell would even a giant prehistoric monster go to a huge modern city? Animals tend to avoid cities. They’re full of annoying people with pointy sticks. In previous movies, the answer was “because people brought the creature into the city” (I can cite at least four cases of this).–But that won’t do in this case. The answer they came up with - the Creature, like salmon, came to this one particular river to spawn. So it was driven here by instinct. It wasn’t the creatrure’s fault that people had built a city here since it got frozen into ice.
TBf20kF didn’t look further into it, but the new Godzilla did and figured that
a.) This made it likely that the creature was female
b.) This gave them an opportunity to introduce a whole lotta smaller creatures that can get into buildings and cause havoc (years before Cloverfield used their version of “whale lice” to do the same thing). It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
The Emmerich Godzilla ism, I think, a b etter film than people give it credit for. But it’s definitely not a Godzilla movie, so people hate it.
By the way – why do you think it’s a gender switch? How do we know the Toho Godzilla ISN’T female? Where do you think Son of Godzilla (Minya) came from?
Louis Anderson as Christine Basket in Baskets was great.
And here were the rest of us, who know about both of you, wondering, Why in the world did @CalMeacham mention, but not explicitly call out, @Roderick_Femm?
Hi. You are one of the few in this regard, I think, even though it gave its name to a whole genre of films that were popular for another 20 years or more, and any number of tropes.
Male voices were used for a female character.