Now Eddie finds his female side
EDDIE Redmayne was being transf o r med into a woman on Sunset Strip. Celebrated movement director Alexandra Reynolds flew to Los Angeles from London to work with the Oscarnominated actor on the finer points of the female sex for his next film.
‘We’re observing the minutiae of feminine physicality, ’ Redmayne told me, adding that Reynolds had also helped him to develop the limited physical movement of cosmologist Stephen Hawking for the film The Theory Of Everything.
The actor’s pressing need to explore womanliness, in all its aspects, is because of a role he will play in director Tom Hooper’s Working Title film The Danish Girl, about transgender pioneer Einar Wegener, which starts filming next month.
Eddie has been working for several hours a day with Reynolds since Monday — the day after he won a Golden Globe.
‘We’re looking at everything from a feminine perspective,’ he told me. ‘How to sit, to walk, to pose, roll on a pair of stockings. How to put on a pair of heels and how to walk i n them. Everything!’
We were chatting after a dinner at the Sunset Tower on Sunset Boulevard where guests included directors Ron Howard and Sacha Gervasi. Also at the event were actresses Demi Moore, Melanie Griffith, Minnie Driver, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Lily Collins — and Felicity Jones, who created an indelible portrait of Hawking’ s first wife Jane Wilde, a doctor of romantic l anguages, i n The Theory Of Everything, alongside Redmayne.
Felicity also collected some Oscar bounty, as she was nominated in the Best Actress category.
Eddie said the story of Wegener and his wife, illus- trator and painter Gerda Gottlieb (Alicia Vikander), was a study of ‘authenticity, identity and love’.
He told me he’d spoken with members of the transgender community, which was in its infancy in the 1920s.
‘The danger of surgery was so extreme then,’ he said. ‘It’s such a brave thing that Einar did.’ Many of Gorda Gottleib’s most famous erotic paintings show a coquettish woman with beautiful legs. It later emerged that they were posed f or by Einar — who also went by the name of Lily. Interestingly, one of the bi g wi ns at t he Golden Gl ob e awards was for a TV drama on Amazon called Transparent, about another t r ansgender person. And the Netflix hit Orange Is The New Black features a f emale ch a r - acter played by openly transgender actress Laverne Cox.