Right Cinema

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow is Nicole Kidman’s wife In ‘The Danish Girl’ replacing Charlize Theron in the forthcoming movie based on the David Ebershoff novel and directed by Thomas Alfredson, a fictionalization of the real life story of transsexual artist Einar Wegener (a.k.a. Lili Elbe) who was one of the first individuals to undergo a sex-change operation in the 1920s.

The actress will portray his wife, portrait painter and illustrator Greta Gottlieb. Academy Award winning actress Nicole Kidman also serves as one of the movie’s producers via her production company, Blossom Films. The screenwriter is Lucinda Coxon. Alfredson, the film’s aforementioned director is known for his vampire movie Let The Right One In.

The real-life couple, the Danish artist Einar Mogens Wegener and his wife were married in 1904 and remained together until 1929, when he underwent what became a series of sex change operations.

Prior to the surgeries, Wegener had been posing as a woman for his wife’s paintings and illustrations. As the novel recounts the story it was as dressing up as a woman to become a stand-in for an absent model for his wife that he first came to an awareness of his true identity. At the time they were living in Copenhagen where they were eventually met with intolerance. They moved to Paris where he became known as Lili Elbe. Once his transformation from man to woman was completed the couple’s marriage was then annulled by the Danish government. One of the first post-op transsexuals in history, indeed a pioneer, she suffered an untimely death in 1931 from complications from one of the surgical procedures.

You can see several before and after pictures of Einar Wegener here.

The highly anticipated movie will be released in Australia and New Zealand in 2010. It is scheduled for release in the U.S. in 2011. That is the latest word on the screen adaptation which with the departure of Charlize Theron now sees the casting of Gwyneth Paltrow as Nicole Kidman’s Wife In ‘The Danish Girl.’

Photos: Patricia Schlein/WENN.com, www.wenn.com