“A WHOLE DIFFERENT SEX” Barbette and the Art of Drag Performance in Some Like It Hot (1959)

During the early days of production on Some Like It Hot, writer-director Billy Wilder purportedly brought in the Texan-born drag artist Barbette, whom he knew from her acclaimed performances in Berlin and Paris in the late 20s and early 30s, to work with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. This talk aims to chronicle the story of Barbette, whose work as a cross-dressing vaudeville and circus artist became an international sensation. The granular details of that collaboration have not yet been fully presented; we don’t yet know, for instance, the deep background of Barbette and her wider impact in Europe and at home. In 1969, she was made the subject of a New Yorker profile, “An Angel, a Flower, a Bird,” by the Cocteau-biographer Francis Steegmuller (Cocteau was thoroughly transfixed by her, writing a tribute “Le numéro Barbette” in the mid 1920s and hiring photographer Man Ray to immortalize her on film, and then casting her in his debut experimental film Le Sang d’un Poète of 1930). There is also considerable speculation that she may even have served as the chief inspiration for Viktor und Viktoria (dir. Reinhold Schünzel, 1933). Drawing on the research conducted at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, and at archives across the globe, this lecture will zero in on that specific story within the context of the larger production history surrounding the great American sex comedy.

Noah Isenberg is the George Christian Centennial Professor and Chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. The author, most recently, of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller; his anthology, Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton University Press, 2021), has just been published in paperback.

The lecture will take place Tuesday October 18, 2022 at 5:00 PM; Lecture in Stone Auditorium (Woldenberg 210), followed by a reception with hors d'oeuvres and wine. 

And to refresh your memory of one of the most famous film comedies of all time, join us for a screening of the film in Stone Auditorium the Friday before – Oct. 14th at 5 pm!