De Niro is hardly alone among his generation of actors in donning a dress. Perhaps Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie stands out, although recently John Travolta put on not just a dress but also a bulging fat suit to play Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were Daphne and Josephine in Some Like It Hot, Terence Stamp and Guy Pearce went femme in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and even macho guys Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes shaved their legs for To Wong Foo.
Of course, it can work the other way round: women have gained huge box-office cred by playing men - most recently Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in the forthcoming I'm Not There. Tilda Swinton's character veered between male and female in the film version of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Hilary Swank played a girl posing as a boy in Boys Don't Cry, and Desperate Housewives' Felicity Huffman in Transamerica was a woman playing a man who wants to be a woman! Back with the men, butch, hetero cross-dressing has mostly been for comic effect.
Few have put on a skirt without laughing; only Johnny Depp in Before Night Falls and Ed Wood come to mind. Then there's the Godfather of all method machismo - Marlon Brando. Brando wore a granny dress in The Missouri Breaks, donned full kabuki maquillage and robes in The Island of Dr Moreau and, allegedly insisted on a bonnet, wig, make-up and pinafore to do the voice-over part of an old lady for his final-ever performance in the still-never-seen animation Big Bug Man.
I guess De Niro thought if it's good enough for Marlon...
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