Victor Victoria is a 1982 musical comedy film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer starring Julie Andrews, James Garner, Robert Preston, Lesley Ann Warren, Alex Karras, and John Rhys-Davies.
The film was produced by Tony Adams, directed by Blake Edwards, and scored by Henry Mancini, with lyrics by Leslie Bricusse.
It was adapted in 1995 as a Broadway musical. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won the Academy Award for Original Music Score. It is a remake of Viktor und Viktoria, a German film of 1933.
In 1934, Carroll Todd, aka Toddy, a middle-aged gay performer at Chez Lui in Paris, sees Labisse, the club owner, auditioning a wan and impoverished soprano, Victoria Grant. After the audition, Labisse drily writes her off, and she responds by sustaining a pitch to shatter his wine glass using resonant frequency. That night a club brawl leads Labisse to fire Toddy and ban him from the club. Walking home, he spots Victoria dining at a restaurant, and she invites him to join her. As neither of them can pay for the meal, she dumps a cockroach in her salad to avoid paying their check, but it escapes and the whole place breaks out in havoc. The duo run out through the rain to Toddy’s, and he invites her to stay when she finds that the rain has shrunken her cheap clothes.
The next morning Richard, a young hustler who was Toddy’s lover, shows up to collect his things. Wearing Richard’s clothes, Victoria surprises him, punches him after he insults Toddy, and literally kicks him out. Witnessing this, Toddy is struck with the inspiration of passing Victoria off as a man and presenting her to Andre Cassell, the most successful agent in Paris, as a female impersonator.
Cassell accepts her as Count Victor Grazinski, a gay Polish female impersonator and Toddy’s new boyfriend. Cassell gets her an initial nightclub show and invites a collection of club owners to the opening. Among the guests is gangster King Marchand, an owner of multiple clubs in Chicago. King attends the opening with his ditsy moll Norma Cassidy and burly bodyguard Bernstein, aka Squash.
Victor is a hit, and King is smitten, but devastated and incredulous when she is “revealed” as a man at the end of her act.
After Norma endlessly riles him over it, and his subsequent failure with her later that night, he sends her back to America.
