**THE MOST FAMOUS WOMAN IN THE WORLD**
SYNOPSIS
The film opens in the early fifties as a plane is preparing to land. On it, a mysterious blonde nervously checks her makeup. We can’t see her entire face -- in isolation, we glimpse her carefully made up lips and her eyes outlined in black.
Traveling with her is Ben White, a tabloid reporter, who has been hired to accompany Christine on a press tour. The tension between them is thick.
When she steps to the door of the plane, we see Christine Jorgensen for the first time -- the way America did in newsreels from 1953 – a slim, elegant blonde wearing a mink coat. The first public male-to-female transsexual.
Flashback three years, Christine, now George, arrives home from serving in the army and his parents are ready for him to start a new life. But George’s hidden troubles are starting to break through his carefully constructed male façade. He drinks too much and starts a fire in the attic of his parents’ house. His mother discovers that he has a hidden cache of women’s clothes. His desperation peaks and he buys a boat ticket. As his dismayed and confused family stands by, George tells them he is going to Denmark to pursue his documentary filmmaking interests. What they don’t know is his plans to begin his physical transition with a hormone specialist.
Two years later, living in Copenhagen with his long-time friends, George’s appearance has changed. George tries to explain his situation to his dumbstruck hosts, but they get more and more concerned for his safety and then, when he’s beaten, for their own.
Meanwhile, George moves forward as he convinces Danish scientists and psychiatrists to go ahead and perform the experimental surgeries to make him a physical woman. Many hormone shots and two surgeries later, Christine, is born.
After surgery, Christine meets and falls in love with reporter Ben White. Their unconventional love story evolves as her sense of control dissolves. It’s 1952, how do you tell the man you’re falling in love with that you once were a man?
Before she has the opportunity, Ben discovers the truth, brutally confronts her and breaks the story about her sex change in the press. With her private life over, Christine accepts Ben’s offer to tell her story for a significant sum, but on two conditions – she gets to show her documentary in the States and she never has to see him again.
Back in the U.S., Christine has an awkward homecoming with her tight knit family. They are surprisingly supportive, but worried and overwhelmed. Christine takes New York almost by storm as she becomes the most written about woman of 1953. She goes to Los Angeles to premiere her travelogue on Copenhagen and meets Howard Knox, an old friend of the family. They strike up a friendship, but her life starts to fall apart, when the doc bombs and the press begin to attack her as “a castrated male in a dress.” Nonetheless, Howard asks her to marry him – but they are denied a marriage license all because of her “boyish past.”
At rock bottom, she gets drunk at Chasen’s and runs into Ben White. When the Maitre ‘D refuses to let her use the ladies room, she threatens to pee in the middle of the restaurant. Ben jumps in and steers her to the coat room. Alone, she is vulnerable and Ben again sees the girl he fell for in Copenhagen. As their chemistry reignites, Howard whisks Christine away. Looking humiliated and lost, Christine exits Chasen’s and walks directly into a vicious throng of paparazzi.
In a bleak early spring landscape, Christine arrives at The Kinsey Institute where she meets with Dr. Alfred Kinsey. They talk frankly about her surgeries and her sex life. He educates her on how she has changed the definition of sex and gender. Her new-found confidence allows her to try and create a cabaret act, to pay her bills and recreate her life.
She goes to Las Vegas and works with some showgirls to try and entertain as she works with Ben on how to sell out the room. To a packed house, Christine let’s loose and sings “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” She can’t sing or dance, but her self-deprecating humor wins over the crowd.
Afterward, in her hotel suite with Ben White, the facades fall down and truths are told. They carve an oasis in the Las Vegas desert -- and finally make sexy, but awkward love. In the morning, Ben is gone.
Christine is alone. As a woman, she has managed to win sexual freedom and public acceptance, but not the domestic ideal that she craved – love, marriage and a white picket fence.