Julian Eltinge, perhaps the greatest female impersonator of the 20th century, was born William Julian Dalton in Newtonville, Massachusetts, on May 14, 1881. He appears to have first appeared on stage in female garb in the Boston Cadets Revue in Boston at the age of ten. He made his first appearance on Broadway in 1904, in the musical comedy Mr. Wix of Wickham. Soon after, he appeared in vaudeville and toured Europe and the United States, giving a command performance before King Edward VII in 1906. Unlike many female impersonators of his time, Eltinge did not present a caricature of a woman but rather the illusion of actually being a woman. In 1911, Eltinge appeared in The Fascinating Widow, the first of a series of musical comedies written specifically for his talents. By the following year, he was so popular that a newly built theater on 42nd Street was named after him. He also published a magazine with tips and beauty secrets for women, with advertisements for his own line of beauty products. In 1917, he appeared in his first feature film, The Countess Charming. He continued to appear in vaudeville, and was for a time one of the highest paid actors on the American stage, living in splendor in one of the most lavish mansions in Los Angeles, the Villa Capistrano. However, times and taste change, and by the 1930s, with the arrival of the Great Depression and the death of vaudeville, the female impersonations that Eltinge had built his career on had begun to lose popularity, and Eltinge found himself performing in increasingly sleazy nightclubs. He died in New York on March 7, 1941, following a show at a nightclub.