Warhol Star Holly Woodlawn
Getty Images

Andy Warhol superstar & Lou Reed muse Holly Woodlawn, RIP

Holly Woodlawn
(photo by Jack Mitchell)

Holly came from Miami F-L-A,
Hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A.,
Plucked her eyebrows on the way,
Shaved her legs and then he was a she. – Lou Reed, “Walk on the Wild Side”

Holly Woodlawn, the transgender actress who became one of Andy Warhols’ “superstars” and was memorialized in Lou Reed‘s “Walk on the Wild Side,” died on Sunday (12/6) in Los Angeles after a battle with cancer. She was 69. More from the NY Times:

With great aplomb, Ms. Woodlawn took her place in the Warhol pantheon alongside two other freshly minted stars, the transgender actresses Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling. Together, they brought a daffy, deadpan style to Mr. Morrissey’s next film, “Women in Revolt,” also produced by Warhol, a satire on the women’s liberation movement, with Ms. Woodlawn playing a nymphomaniac fashion model who detests men and joins the militant organization P.I.G. (Politically Involved Girls).

“I didn’t know what the movement was when I made it,” Ms. Woodlawn told The Village Voice in 1970, before the film was released. “They told me you play a leader in women’s lib, and in my first scene I said, ‘O.K. girls, let’s get out and vote.'”…

…She had some success as a cabaret artist in the late 1970s, appearing at Reno Sweeney in Manhattan, but by the end of the decade she was back in Miami, bussing tables at a Benihana restaurant and working for her father’s tax business. She relocated to West Hollywood in the 1990s and had occasional cameo roles in films like “Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss” in 1998 and, in 2014, the Amazon television series “Transparent.”

“I felt like Elizabeth Taylor,” Ms. Woodlawn told The Guardian in 2007, recalling her heyday. “Little did I realize that not only would there be no money, but that your star would flicker for two seconds and that was it. But it was worth it, the drugs, the parties; it was fabulous.”

Holly, you’ll be missed. Rest in peace.