Bothwell Browne

Bothwell Browne, born Walter Bothwell Bruhn on March 7, 1877, in Copenhagen, Denmark, was a Danish-American stage and film performer who built his career as a female impersonator. He grew up in San Francisco and developed a vaudeville act there before achieving recognition on the national stage. He died in Los Angeles on December 12, 1947, at the age of 70.

Browne began his professional performing life in vaudeville and at one point worked as a duo alongside male impersonator Kathleen Clifford. Around 1900 he joined the Cohan and Harris Minstrels, and in 1908 made his New York debut in Winning the Gibson Girl, in which he played the title role by impersonating a Gibson Girl. In 1910 he achieved a significant stage success with The Pantaloon Girl, a production in which he performed five distinct impersonations.

His Broadway credit, the musical Miss Jack, opened in September 1911 at the Herald Square Theater. The production ran for only sixteen performances and was considered a disappointment. Its opening came exactly one week before The Fascinating Widow, a competing production featuring the better-known female impersonator Julian Eltinge, who had pioneered the form in early cinema. Some audiences and theater managers regarded Browne's impersonations as more seductive and therefore more unsettling than Eltinge's work.

Browne made a single film appearance in the 1919 Mack Sennett production Yankee Doodle in Berlin, which was Sennett's highest-budget film to that point and served as World War I propaganda. In the film, Browne played American combat pilot Captain Bob White, who infiltrates enemy German lines in disguise and causes disruption within the German military high command. The film was promoted through touring road shows that included members of Sennett's Bathing Beauties as well as cast members. In December 1919, Browne headlined at the Palace Theater in New York, the most sought-after booking in American vaudeville, with the Sennett Bathing Beauties appearing on the same bill. Following this period, he retired from performing and returned to San Francisco, where he taught dancing classes and produced nightclub acts.