Opposites Attract: Gender Roles in Early Cinema Abstract Nothing shocks an audience as much as a character who intended to be one sexual orientation is played by the opposite sex. For them most part in Hollywood the reason why a studio would hire a male actor to play a female role or a female actress for a male role would have various meanings. An actress might be paid less, or the role is physically impossible for a male or female actor to play. This is something that is easily noticed in the earliest of cinema when Charlie Chaplin played the wife in the silent film A Busy Day , or when Betty Bronson played Peter Pan for the first time. Both characters are easily distinguishable for who they’re supposed to be, male or female, but their roles were played by the opposite gender. This paper is meant to study how Hollywood used male and female actors to play roles for the opposite sex in order to understand sexuality in film. Where these characters meant to be portrayed...