American actress and drag queen (1903-1996). Born John Cabell Breckinridge in Paris, France, she was born into great wealth. Her family owned the Comstock Lode silver mine in Nevada and the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
The Breckinridge family is pretty extensive, and Bunny had plenty of famous ancestors, including her great-great-great grandfather U.S. Attorney General John Breckinridge, great-grandfather U.S. Vice President and Confederate general John C. Breckinridge, and great-grandfather Lloyd Tevis, the founder of Wells Fargo Bank. There's a whole Wikipedia article full of all the historical figures in the Breckinridge family, reaching all the way back to the colonial period.
She studied at Eton College and Oxford University. She performed Shakespearean theater in England. She got married in 1927, while working as a drag and burlesque entertainer in Paris, to Roselle du Val de Dampierre, the daughter of a French count. They got divorced just a couple years later but had one daughter together. Bunny moved to San Francisco in the late 1920s.
Breckinridge was openly queer and a frequent drag performer, both of which posed some dangers to her career, as well as putting her at risk of arrest or murder. She was popular nonetheless -- she was funny, loud, and flamboyant, and easily made friends, including Noel Coward, Ed Sullivan, Elvis Presley, Princess Margaret, and even (or, frankly, especially) J. Edgar Hoover.
Somewhere around the mid-1950s, Breckinridge was living in the home of Paul Marco, along with David Demering. (Absolutely worth remembering that Marco and Demering were struggling actors, and Breckinridge was a millionaire. I really hope Breckinridge was paying everyone else's rent.) Marco had a friend named Ed Wood Jr. who was a low-rent movie director who was wanting to make a sci-fi movie for cheap. So all three got recruited for the movie, which eventually got released as the infamous "Plan 9 from Outer Space." Marco played Kelton, a police officer. Demering played a pilot. Breckinridge played the Ruler, the head honcho of the aliens.
The movie is notoriously bad, stuffed full of cheap special effects and amateurish acting, but Breckinridge is really pretty good. She had, after all, acted on stage in England in plays by William Shakespeare. That doesn't mean she was taking the role really seriously. She rolled her eyes and mugged for the camera, and wore more mascara and lipstick than you would've expected for a male role. Still, she comes across as calm, competent, and sensible -- probably the only sane person of all the characters in the movie.
Bunny never appeared in another movie, but did return to the theater, playing in small local plays.
Bunny often expressed a wish to undergo gender reassignment surgery, especially after the widespread attention given to Christine Jorgensen after her sex change procedure in 1952. In 1954, she had plans to travel to Denmark for the operation, hoping to marry his male secretary. But around the same time, she was sued for not making good on a prior agreement to pay $8,500 a year to support her elderly mother in England. Later, she planned to have the procedure done in Mexico, but got into a serious car accident while traveling there. She apparently gave up trying to get the surgery after that.
Breckinridge presented as male most of her life and used male pronouns, but I feel like she tried to get gender reassignment surgery twice so that's enough for me to figure she considered herself a woman, even if she didn't have the language or culture to express things that way at the time.
She had plenty of run-ins with the law. In 1955, she was arrested for vagrancy in a waterfront bar in San Francisco, but the charges were dropped. In 1959, she was convicted on ten counts of what was termed "sex perversion" for taking a couple teenage boys on a trip to Las Vegas. She was committed to the Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and released the next year.
In the 1960s, Bunny met with author Gore Vidal and gave him permission to write what she thought was to be her biography. However, Vidal was instead partially inspired by Bunny to write his 1968 novel "Myra Breckinridge," whose main character had gotten a sex change operation in the past.
In Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" biopic, released in 1994, Bunny was played by Bill Murray.
Bunny died in 1996, aged 93, in a nursing home in Monterey, California. Maybe not the best or most perfect life, or the life most free from pain or anguish, but I get the impression she spent most of her time loving her life, and that's not a bad way to live at all.