Bearded Ladies in Hollywood
There aren’t a lot of Hollywood roles for bearded ladies apart from the classic circus sideshow freak. Even then, the bearded women you see in Hollywood have always been regular women wearing fake beards. Women with genuine beards get overlooked for most roles, so they generally don’t become actresses. This is probably why other actresses get all the bearded lady gigs.
Elsa Lanchester in 3 Ring Circus, 1954 (above, top left). Rebecca Romijn in Dirty Work (1998). Dee Booher in Spaceballs, 1987 (above, bottom left), Keala Settle in The Greatest Showman, 2017 (above, bottom right)
In 1930, Loise Fazenda played a bearded lady sideshow in one of the first Hollywood sound shorts, The Bearded Lady, with the tagline, “love is a freak show.” Since then, there have been several Hollywood films featuring bearded ladies as sideshows, but still no significant roles for bearded ladies outside of the circus.