Leonardo DiCaprio to play gay J Edgar Hoover in film penned by writer of ‘Milk’
Former teenage heart throb Leonardo DiCaprio will play J Edgar Hoover, in a biopic of the FBI’s first director as a cross dressing repressed homosexual.
J Edgar, which is directed by Clint Eastwood will see DiCaprio play Hoover as an “emotionally tortured figure trapped in a highly charged relationship with his mother,” who is played by Dame Judi Dench according to the Sunday Times.
The newspaper says it has seen copies of the script of the film that while containing no over sex, show Hoover struggling with sexual feelings for his protégé, Clyde Tolson. The pair would often dress identically, holiday together and were buried a few yards apart from each other.
The film has been written by Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for Milk, the biopic of America’s first openly gay politician Harvey Milk. Last week Mr Lance Black said he would deal with Hoover’s sexuality in “in a human, realistic way: homosexuality without gay stereotypes”.
Although the script makes reference to Hoover’s alleged cross-dressing, DiCaprio said that he was unlikely to be seen on-screen in a frock. “We have not done the fittings for those,” he said when asked if he would be cross-dressing. “So I don’t think so.”
In 1995, DiCaprio depicted the gay relationship between poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine in the film Total Eclipse.
In 2009, papers revealed the investigations that the FBI under Hoover conducted into the sexuality of well known individuals including presidential aide Jack Valenti.
