Actress Glenn Close has taken on the tough role of a cross-dressing female in 19th-century Dublin in new film Albert Nobbs.


Albert Nobbs is likely to pose more questions than it answers. Nobbs is an abused Irish woman who passes as a male waiter “in order to combat rampant gender and class inequality in 19th-century Dublin”. 
Labelled as a “crossdresser,” Nobbs saves his money under the floorboards so that he may one day open a business (a goal unlikely to be achieved as a woman).


Close has wanted to bring this project to the screen for many years, having won an off-Broadway award for her 1982 portrayal of Nobbs in 1982. Close is producer, screenwriter and lead actress in the film adaptation.


On the character of Albert Nobbs, Close says, “She’s a strange hybrid. She’s still very separate from her body. She’s more comfortable now in her guise as a man than she would [be] as a woman. If she went into a dress she wouldn’t know how to behave. She’s caught in the middle. In the story, [director] George Moore calls her a perhapser.”


The Advocate’s Jake Finney says, “He does not fit within our emerging concepts of transgender men or crossdressers. There is no neat and tidy box for us to place him in. He actually still identifies as a woman, yet somehow we find ourselves referring to him with masculine pronouns. He is a bit of threat too, since he is truly a woman posing as a man, and mainstream society sees transgender people as posers too, as if they went through all the pains of transition and live with all the discrimination simply to trick the rest of the world, hence all the bad jokes we see in mainstream media of transgender women with a deep voice, implying that they are men dressed as women and therefore the butt of jokes. 


“Transgender activists have been working long and hard to educate people and break down the misconceptions that we are deceivers, and Albert can easily set us back. Still, Albert has the right to exist and identify however he wants, just like everyone else, without fear of harm or discrimination.”