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Aleshia Brevard, transgender model, actress and writer
Aleshia Brevard, who has died aged 79, was an actress, model and writer and one of the first men to undergo transitional surgery in America during the early 1960s.
Buxom yet elegant, she based her look on the classic Hollywood blondes Jean Harlow, Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed Marilyn herself went to see Miss Brevard perform at Finocchio's, the notorious San Francisco nightclub famous for female impersonators, shortly before her death in 1962.
Aleshia Brevard, New York, 2006.Credit: www.aleshiabrevard.com
"It was only when the lights went up I noticed her wiggle," Aleshia Brevard later recalled. "I screamed in excitement. She blew me a kiss." Recounting that night in her diary, Marilyn wrote that watching Aleshia Brevard was like seeing herself on film.
Aleshia Brevard was born Alfred Brevard Crenshaw on December 9, 1937, to southern fundamentalist parents at Trousdale, in the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee where she was brought up in abject poverty on a rural farm.
Aleshia Brevard as a model, 1962,Credit: www.aleshiabrevard.com
Young Alfred spent his days dreaming of movie stars. After leaving school at 15 he immediately headed west to California on the Greyhound bus. Inspired by George Jorgensen, who made transsexual history when in 1952 she became Christine, Alfred began the transition process into Aleshia in the late 1950s.
From an early age she had wanted to be a movie star. "I'd drape a towel over my head peek-a-boo style and pretend to be Veronica Lake," she remembered. "I'd hide my desires in the shadows because I truly believed if anyone saw the truth of who I really wanted to be I would be given away."
Drawn to Finocchio's, she soon became the star attraction and in three years she had earned enough money to travel to Los Angeles to meet with the urologist Dr Elmer Belt.
After a series of consultations, Aleshia Brevard became one of the first people to undergo transgender surgery in 1962, but afterwards she kept her true identity to herself. "If Hollywood knew I'd been born a boy," she explained, "there'd have been only doors slammed in my face."
After returning to Tennessee to recover, she enrolled at Middle Tennessee State University, graduating in 1965. Following a stint as a Playboy bunny she studied acting, making her television debut on The Red Skelton Show and then in film in The Love God (1969).
Next came the sci-fi horror Bigfoot (1970), and her role as Sadie in The Female Bunch (1971) – about a headstrong leader of a group of feminists in charge of a secret society – which was filmed at the Spahn ranch outpost of the Manson family.
By contrast her next appearance was on The Partridge Family, followed by The Dean Martin Show and the ABC soap opera One Life To Live.
By the end of the 1970s she had earned an MA from Marshall University and supplemented her income teaching film and theatre studies.
Later films included the comedy crime thriller The Man with Bogart's Face and Smokey and the Judge (both 1980), followed by the animated feature American Pop and director David Greene's Hard Country (both 1981), featuring Jan-Michael Vincent and Kim Basinger.
After her surgery she married four times, although two of her husbands never knew of her past. Keen to compete on an equal footing with other actresses, for decades she kept quiet about her background. "I succeeded and failed solely on my ability," she said recently.
Aleshia Brevard lived her life as a woman outside the transgender community until publishing her best-selling memoir, The Woman I Was Not Born to Be: A Transsexual Journey (2001). An equally successful sequel followed in 2010.
She produced more than 20 plays – including five based on her own books – across America. Her first novel, Bilbo's Bend, was released in 2013.
Telegraph, London