Actors In Film

• Eddie Redmayne as Einar Wegener / Lili Elbe
• Alicia Vikander as Gerda Wegener
• Amber Heard as Oola
• Matthias Schoenaerts
• Ben Whishaw

Inspired by the true story of Danish painter Einar Wegener and his wife, this tender portrait of a marriage asks: What do you do when someone you love wants to change? It starts with a question, a simple favor asked of a husband by his wife on an afternoon chilled by the Baltic wind while both are painting in their studio. Her portrait model has canceled, and would he mind slipping into a pair of women’s shoes and stockings for a few moments so she can finish the painting on time. Of course, he answers. Anything at all. With that, one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the twentieth century begins – IMDB

Eddie Wins Oscar For “The Theory Of Everything”

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Academy Award-winner Eddie Redmayne and directed by Academy Award-winner Tom Hooper

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Ebershoff, the publishing director at Modern Library, has taken a highly unusual subject–and a big chance–for his first novel. That it comes off triumphantly is a tribute to his taste and restraint and to the highly empathetic quality of his imagination. His book is based on the real-life story of Einar Wegener, a Danish artist who 70 years ago became the first man to be medically transformed into a woman–long before the much better-known case of Christine Jorgensen.

Photo Amber Heard

Ebershoff has naturally changed some of the characters, giving Einar an American wife from his own native city of Pasadena, thereby introducing a New World perspective on the drama. For a very real drama it is. Einar struggles with his inclinations to become the woman he and his wife, Greta, refer to as Lili, seemingly more agonized about what the change would mean than Greta, who is deeply loving and amazingly supportive throughout Einar’s long ordeal.

Photo Ben Whishaw and Eddie

Seldom has the delicate question of sexual identity been more subtly probed (one would have to go all the way back to Jan Morris’s autobiographical Conundrum); and Ebershoff’s remarkable feel for the period atmosphere and detail of 1920s Copenhagen and early-’30s Dresden, where Lili’s life-transforming operation is finally performed, has been poetically and intensely rendered. The portraits of the various medical men who offer their very different solutions to the problem are brilliantly accomplished. The original story ended much more unhappily than Ebershoff’s, but his poignant and visionary conclusion is a fitting one for what is, above all, and despite its sensationalist trimmings, a profound and beautifully realized love story.