American actress, playwright, poet, cabaret singer and Warhol superstar, she was immortalised in Lou Reed’s 1972 song “Walk on the Wild Side” (“Jackie is just speeding away / Thought she was James Dean for a day”). A resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jackie lived and performed – sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. She was celebrated as a genius and became a legend, even before her tragic death. Jackie lived with her grandmother above her bar for much of her life.
Jackie Curtis’ friendship and professional association with Andy Warhol began in the mid-1960s. Curtis appeared in Director Paul Morrissey’s Women in Revolt with Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn and Flesh with Joe Dallesandro and Candy Darling, presented by Andy Warhol. For these unique films, director Morrissey gave the actors information about their character, the scene and suggested lines. The camera (frequently manned by Warhol) rolled and everyone improvised much of the content in a single take. After Curtis’ death in 1985, a friend found a note Jackie had written reading: “You are not truly a Warhol superstar unless you are dead.”
Jackie loved being on stage. Her wild creative energies were unleashed on appreciative audiences at venues including Playhouse of the Ridiculous, La Mama E.T.C., the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Bastianos Theater, Pyramid, and many other Manhattan theatres.
Her talent transcended gender and she reveled in melodramatic female roles. For some of her best roles, Jackie was her own playwright. She began writing plays in the late 1960s in which she usually appeared as the female lead. Glamour, Glory, and Gold, and Lucky Wonderful were produced in 1967 and 1968 at the Bastianos Theater. Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit was performed by John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous in 1969. A prolific writer, Jackie was a published poet.
In 1970, Jackie Curtis auditioned in drag for Busby Berkeley’s revival of the 1920s musical No, No, Nanette – but was ahead of her time to be part of the chorus line. Her cabaret performances were stunning. In 1973 she appeared at the New York Cultural Center in Cabaret in the Sky – an Evening with Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis, an event attended by gay New York and “cafe society” alike. Her production of Vain Victory appeared at La Mama in 1971. It was an immediate smash hit and ran all summer long to packed houses.
Jackie’s last two productions were I Died Yesterday (the Frances Farmer story) in 1984, and Champagne in 1985.
While performing in drag, Curtis would typically wear lipstick, glitter, bright red hair, ripped dresses, and stockings. Curtis pioneered this combination of trashy and glamour, a style that has prompted assertions that Curtis inspired the glitter rock or glam rock movement of the 1970s.
Jackie Curtis was the subject of a 2004 documentary Superstar in a Housedress. She died of an accidental heroin overdose on 15 May 1985 at just 38 years old.
Link to Wikipedia biography