Holly Woodlawn: Actress and star of Andy Warhol's Factory, immortalised in 'Walk on the Wild Side'

Woodlawn on the set of 'Trash': it was amateurish yet pioneering, ridiculous yet brilliant (Rex)

Few people, as they sing along with Lou Reed's “Walk on the Wild Side”, would recognise the life of a transgender Puerto Rican woman. As Reed sang: “Holly came from Miami, F-L-A / Hitchhiked her way across the USA / Plucked her eyebrows on the way / Shaved her legs and then he was a she / She says, 'Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side.'”

The woman Reed sung about – an actress whose raw talent Andy Warhol commandeered for two of his famed underground films – was Holly Woodlawn, who has died of cancer and cirrhosis aged 69. “There was no role model for a Holly Woodlawn,” said Penny Arcade, a fellow Warhol acolyte. “For Holly, whatever sacrifices she made in terms of acceptance of her family and society could never compete with the sense of freedom that Holly needed – the freedom to be herself.”

Woodlawn was born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl in 1946 in Puerto Rico. She was not repressed, she recalled in 2007. “I was raised in Puerto Rico for the first few years of my life, where the culture is more Caribbean. Everyone's naked, it's hotter, you come out earlier. I was having sex when I was seven and eight in the bushes with my uncles and cousins – of course, they were only 11 or 12 themselves. I was raised in a house full of women and my uncle was gay.”

Of that young male, Woodlawn recalled, “I don't even know who he was. When I was younger, I was extremely shy and living in what's now Miami Beach. My father had a nice job. I guess we were middle income. I had good schools. I just was unhappy because I didn't know who I was.”

As Reed wrote, Woodlawn left home at 15 for New York. As a performer with the Play-House of the Ridiculous – what fellow performer Arcade called “the original glitter glam queer political rock-and-roll theatre of the '60s” – Woodlawn was soon on the periphery of Warhol's Factory scene, a melange of artists, musicians and hustlers. And though the pecking order in that scene was ever-shifting, Woodlawn, cast in two landmark Warhol films, Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1971), found herself at the centre of it for a time.

Trash told the tale of heroin addict Joe (Joe Dallesandro, or “Little Joe” of “Walk on the Wild Side”) and Holly (Woodlawn) trying to eke out a living. Like much of Warhol's filmography, Trash is a study in contrasts: amateurish, pioneering, ridiculous and brilliant. “In spite of the grubbiness of the scene and the ineffectuality of the various disguises and escapes employed by Joe and Holly and the rest, there is no sense of despair,” the New York Times wrote in 1970. “At heart, the film is a kind of exuberant exhibition of total apathy.”

Women in Revolt, in which Woodlawn and two other “female impersonators”, as the New York Times put it at the time, play women struggling with female liberation, was both “the ultimate put-down of women's lib, as well as the ultimate endorsement.” Of Warhol's casting, Woodlawn said: “I think that basically Andy just loved glamorous women, and around that time, he just didn't know any.”

The New York Times wrote: “Women in Revolt is a comparatively elaborate Warhol movie with a limited intelligence, but unlike a lot of better movies, it uses almost all of the intelligence available to it. Thus, in a crazy way, it must be called a success.”

According to Arcade, Women in Revolt inspired Warhol to inspire Reed in his turn to write “Walk on the Wild Side”. “It wasn't Lou Reed's idea to write,” said Arcade, who also appeared in the film. “Warhol suggested it to Lou Reed because of the movie we were all in, Women in Revolt.” Reed drew on the lives of Woodlawn and others in what he called “the gay life” to make Transformer (1972), arguably his best album. Woodlawn did not object to being immortalised, and called “Walk on the Wild Side” “completely true.”

“I was very happy when I gradually became a Warhol superstar,” she said. “I felt like Elizabeth Taylor! Little did I realise 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. You live in a hovel, walk up five flights, scraping the rent. And then at night you go to Max's Kansas City where Mick Jagger and Fellini and everyone's there in the back room. And when you walked in that room, you were a STAR!”

After Trash and Women in Revolt, Woodlawn moved to Los Angeles, studied fashion design, continued to make films, and last year appeared in the Emmy-winning series Transparent. But she remained on the margins, doing cabaret, making appearances at Warhol-related events, and writing a memoir. Penny Arcade expressed dismay that, in the era of Caitlyn Jenner, the lives of trans women who have been out for decades are overlooked.

“In this period where many, many trans women are extremely delicate and touchy and prissy, it would be very hard to understand somebody like Holly Woodlawn who was rough and ready and didn't really care about pronouns and didn't care if her beard was showing,” Arcade said. A Caitlyn Jenner erases the visibility of Holly Woodlawn.“

It's far from clear that Woodlawn, a woman not known for her politics, would care. Once asked whether she thought the armed forces discriminated against trans people, she replied, “Thank God they do. Otherwise I'd be fighting in Vietnam.”

Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl (Holly Woodlawn), actress: born Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico 26 October 1946; died Los Angeles 6 December 2015.

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