The retelling of transgender lives in diverse contexts, for different audiences and with varying effects has been a central concern of this book, with a particular focus on the impact of intertextual relationships, whether between memoir, biography, drama or fiction. This final chapter explores the afterlives of two of the texts analysed in previous chapters through a focus on the depiction of transgender characters in film adaptation, a genre characterised by its complex relationship to source texts and to changing cultural conditions of production and reception. The films examined in this chapter are both period dramas: Albert Nobbs (directed by Rodrigo García, screenplay by Glenn Close, John Banville and Gabriella Prekop, 2011) centres on the lives of two late-nineteenth-century working-class men, Albert Nobbs and Hubert Page, while The Danish Girl (directed by Tom Hooper, screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, 2016) depicts a historical subject, Lili Elbe (1882-1931), reputed to be the first recipient of successful gender reassignment treatment. They are adaptations of fiction published at the start and at the close of the twentieth century - George Moore's Albert Nobbs (1918) and David Ebershoff's The Danish Girl (2000) - and the relationship between these films and their ostensible literary sources is made more complex by the presence of further intertexts: Simone Benmussa's 1977 stage adaptation of Moore's novella, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, and Niels Hoyer's 1931 ‘memoir’, Man into Woman. Released in a contemporary context in which issues to do with the representation of transgender people in all forms of media have attracted new scrutiny, these films offer portraits of transgender characters evidently intended to elicit audience sympathy. However, they also exhibit an uneven relationship to gender norms, often enlisting their transgender protagonists as agents of normative gender and sexuality. Indeed, the dramatic focus on heterosexual marriage in these film adaptations is especially striking: in Albert Nobbs Hubert Page is depicted as the unassuming saviour of turn-of-the-century masculinity and marriage, whereas in The Danish Girl the demise of a heterosexual marriage competes with the premature death of its protagonist as the tragic climax of the drama.

Before turning to the films in question it is important to situate them in the context of cinematic representations of transgender characters and to consider their place in relation to film genre, including period drama and literary adaptation.