Julian Eltinge born 14 May 1881 (d. 1941)In the 1910s and 1920s, Julian Eltinge was one of the biggest stars of the day, the toast of Broadway and vaudeville, and an enormously popular and wealthy star of silent film. With music composed by Jerome Kern and other leading composers of the day, and lyrics often written by Eltinge himself, his theatrical farces were phenomenal critical and financial successes.
Regarded by many as the greatest female impersonator in history, today Eltinge is all but forgotten and his life and work virtually unknown to the public.When not performing, he invested a great deal of effort into creating a masculine persona - boxing, horse-riding, (staged) bar fights, ladies' man - to deflect rumours of his homosexuality. There is no record of lovers of either sex although there were plenty of stories. He never married, as they say.
Despite great international success Eltinge's career began to fade in the 1930s. Times and tastes were changing, and alcoholism, and other personal and financial problems seemed to spin him into a decline. By the 1930s, the female impersonations that he had built his career had begun to lose popularity. Eltinge resorted to performing in sleazy nightclubs. Crackdowns on cross-dressing in public, meant to curb homosexual activity, prevented Eltinge from performing in costume. At one appearance in a Los Angeles club, Eltinge stood next to displays of his gowns while taking on his characters.
The performances in nightclubs continued and while performing in New York in 1941, Eltinge died in his hotel room of what is reported to have been a cerebral hemorrhage, though the circumstances are considered mysterious to some scholars.