Elizabeth Coffey
American actress
Elizabeth Coffey Williams (née Coffey, born March 1948), simply known by her maiden name Elizabeth Coffey, is an American actress and transgender activist. Coffey, a trans woman, had small but significant roles in four of the early films of John Waters, becoming a member of the Dreamlanders, his regular cast. Her work has been shown at multiple national venues, including the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute.
Early life and education
Coffey was born in 1948 in Brooklyn, New York City, the oldest of five children. At the age of 5, her family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she was raised and attended Northeast Catholic High School, a private, all-male Catholic school, where she often rebelled against the dress code by presenting as a woman, wearing long hair with ponytails, and dating boys. According to her, her parents were "too uptight" to talk to her about her gender identity, but at one point confronted her, asking if she was a "queer" and separating her from the rest of her siblings. Eventually, they accepted it and let her return to the family.
Career
In 1970, she hitchhiked to Baltimore, Maryland, where she openly identified as a transgender woman. While there, she met filmmaker John Waters while in the basement of a church during the premiere of one of his earlier films, Multiple Maniacs. Upon learning that Coffey was transgender, he described to her the idea to include her in his next film as a flasher.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Elizabeth Coffey” as american actress. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american actress. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11857468. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1948 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elizabeth Coffey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.