REEL FACE: | REAL FACE: |
Eddie Redmayne
Born: January 6, 1982 Birthplace: London, England, UK | Lili Elbe (aka Einar Wegener)
Born: December 28, 1882 Birthplace: Vejle, Denmark Death: September 13, 1931, Dresden, Germany (organ rejection) |
Eddie Redmayne
Born: January 6, 1982 Birthplace: London, England, UK | Einar Wegener (aka Lili Elbe)
Born: December 28, 1882 Birthplace: Vejle, Denmark Death: September 13, 1931, Dresden, Germany (organ rejection) |
Alicia Vikander
Born: October 3, 1988 Birthplace: Gothenburg, Västra Götalands län, Sweden | Gerda Wegener
Born: March 15, 1886 Birthplace: Hammelev, Denmark Death: July 28, 1940, Frederiksberg, Denmark |
Amber Heard
Born: April 22, 1986 Birthplace: Austin, Texas, USA | Anna Larssen
Born: September 12, 1875 Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark Death: March 6, 1955, Vedbæk, Denmark |
Yes. The Danish Girl true story reveals that the model who failed to show up was Anna Larssen, a popular actress and friend of the couple. This is believed to have happened around 1908. On the telephone, Anna Larssen suggested to Gerda that the thin-framed Einar stand in for her. Einar hesitated at first, but he eventually succumbed to his wife's pleas, donning a pair of stockings and heels. "I cannot deny, strange as it may sound, that I enjoyed myself in this disguise," Einar wrote. "I liked the feel of soft women's clothing. I felt very much at home in them from the first moment." Einar began to pose for Gerda on an ongoing basis, and after a few years, he began to dress as a woman on a regular basis outside of being his wife's model. -Man into Woman
The real Einar Wegener saw his female side as another person who was trapped inside of him. Helping his wife by standing in for an absent female model was the chance awakening that let loose his deep desire to become Lili. He attempted to suppress her but by February 1930, she was becoming too strong to resist. "I am finished," Einar wrote at the time. "Lili has known this for a long time. That's how matters stand. And consequently she rebels more vigorously every day." -Telegraph.co.uk
Yes, at least to some degree. Lili Elbe's autobiography Man into Woman quotes Gerda as saying, "In recent months I have felt prickings of conscience because I was, to a certain extent, the cause of creating Lili, of enticing her out of you, and thus becoming responsible for a disharmony in you which reveals itself most distinctly on those days when Lili does not appear."
Yes. In The Danish Girl movie, doctors and psychologists label Einar as schizophrenic in order to explain his "malady." They prescribe radiation therapy. This indeed echoes the real-life recommendations made by doctor's Einar met with. -Man into Woman
After arriving in Paris where their secret was not known, Gerda introduced Lili as her husband Einar's sister (in the movie, she is introduced as Einar's cousin). They attended artists balls and other social events together, where, like in The Danish Girl movie, Lili flirted with unsuspecting men. -Telegraph.co.uk
This has been the subject of some debate. Born Einar Wegener, Lili Elbe underwent several gender reassignment operations in the early 1930s. While most articles support that Elbe was the first recipient of sexual reassignment surgery, Biography.com states that Elbe was not the first recipient, but they don't state who was. According to The Danish Girl author David Ebershoff, "None of this had ever been done before, this idea of accomplishing a transition through surgery. There are just no records of anyone even thinking about that before this, so in some ways [Warnekros] was experimenting on Lili." Since Lili Elbe may have been intersex and already possessed rudimentary ovaries, some don't consider her surgical transformation a true sex change. -LOTL Magazine
The exact number of operations Einar underwent to become a woman varies a little across reports, but most list the number at four or five. They were carried out over a period of roughly two years. The first involved removing his testicles (castration). It took place in 1930 in Berlin under the supervision of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the German Institute for Sexual Science. The remaining surgeries were performed at the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic by Dr. Kurt Warnekros (portrayed in the movie by Sebastian Koch), a German obstetrician. They included operations to remove the penis (penectomy), create a vagina, and implant an ovary onto the abdominal musculature. The final surgery was to transplant a womb (uterus) into Einar's body, which ultimately proved fatal. -Telegraph.co.uk
Yes. The true story behind The Danish Girl confirms that Einar Wegener's transformation into Lili Elbe ultimately led to her death. She died from paralysis of the heart due to organ rejection roughly three months after undertaking her fifth and final sex-change operation in June 1931. The operation involved transplanting a womb (uterus) into her body in hopes that she could eventually bear children. "The fervent longing in my woman's life is to become the mother of a child," Lili wrote after the operations. (It would be nearly 50 more years before Ciclosporin, the drug that prevents organ rejection, was first used with success.) -Biography.com
Yes. Einar earned Denmark's Neuhausens prize for his landscape work in 1907 and exhibited at Kunstnernes Efteraarsudstilling (the Artists Fall Exhibition), as well as at the Vejle Art Museum and Salon d'Automme in Paris. In the early years of their marriage, Einar and Gerda earned a living by taking jobs as painters and illustrators for books and magazines such as Vogue.
Gerda's work was featured in the Charlottenborg Art Gallery (the Royal Danish Academy of Art's official exhibition gallery) and, in 1907, she claimed the top prize in a sketching contest in the Danish newspaper Politiken. These achievements helped her to rise to the top of the fashion magazine industry, with her illustrations capturing the Art Deco style of the time. Gerda became famous for her paintings of fashionable women with almond-shaped eyes. Little did people know that the attractive dark-haired woman often depicted in her work was actually her husband Einar. As he began to spend more time as Lili, he spent less and less time working as an artist himself. Though Gerda was more successful than Einar, her artistic style became less fashionable later in her life, and she eventually sold hand-painted Christmas cards to help make ends meet. Her final art exhibition was in 1939 in Copenhagen, the year before her death. -Daily Mail Online
Though the movie's incident is fictional, it has been reported that Einar Wegener looked feminine even when he wasn't dressing as a woman, to the point that he was abused in the streets of Paris because people thought he was a woman trying to dress in men's clothing. This natural feminine appearance is another reason that some people believe he was intersex (a less controversial term for a hermaphrodite), a person possessing physical, genetic and hormonal features of both men and women. -LOTL Magazine
Yes. Lili Elbe/Einar Wegener suggests in her memoir that a pair of shrunken ovaries were discovered inside of her when the doctors were performing her sex change operations. -Telegraph.co.uk
Yes. Lili Elbe had fallen in love and planned to marry a man, an art dealer named Claude Lejeune, at least that was her hope. She died on September 13, 1931. -Telegraph.co.uk
Though she struggled with the thought that she had murdered Einer, the man she had once been, Lili expressed her happiness with her new identity three months prior to her death. "That I, Lili, am vital and have a right to life I have proved by living for 14 months," she wrote in a letter to a friend. "It may be said that 14 months is not much, but they seem to me like a whole and happy human life."
Several days before her death she mailed a letter to her sister. "Now I know that death is near," Lili wrote. "Last night I dreamt about Mother. She took me in her arms and called me Lili…and Father was also there…" -Telegraph.co.uk
No. David Ebershoff's 2001 novel on which the movie is based is itself a work of fiction that is only loosely inspired by Lili Elbe's true story. A better source for information is Lili Elbe's own autobiography, Man into Woman: The First Sex Change, which at the time of this article is not widely available. Niels Hoyer is often listed as the author, but that is a pseudonym for Ernst Ludwig Hathorn Jacobson, Lili's editor who assembled her letters, diary entries and dictated material to form the book.
Preview Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe by watching The Danish Girl movie trailer below.