Kennedy in the movie's central scene re-enacting President John Kennedy's assassination. It was at this time that Waters recognized the actor's potential and renamed his friend 'Divine.'Īfter that unceremonious induction into film, Divine starred in Eat Your Makeup (1968), in which he played the part of Jacqueline His first role was in Roman Candles (1966), a home movie of Waters' friends stealing and then modeling dresses. Meanwhile, he also began acting in Waters' independent movies.

He later opened a fashion boutique in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His parents even bought him his own salon, but he became bored with it. After high school, Divine graduated from beauty school and became known as an excellent stylist. They were both outcasts, and Divine noted in Waters' book Shock Value that he required a daily police escort to and from school to avoid constant beatings by other students. As a teen, Divine was active in school plays, and began associating with Waters, who lived nearby. His parents ran a successful nursery and regularly attended a local Baptist church. He will likely remain famous for his role as the Filthiest Person Alive' in the 1972 Waters film Pink Flamingos, especially due to the notorious scene at the end in which he consumes freshly excreted poodle dung.'ĭivine was born Harris Glenn Milstead on October 19, 1945, and raised in an upper-middle-class home in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, the city that provided the backdrop for the bulk of his films. Life, most of his appearances were in films with shocking subject matter. Though Divine was poised to break through into mainstream film and television at the end of his

In the majority of his films, he played female characters and dressed in women's garb during his short-lived career as a singer. Starring mainly in the films of offbeat director John Waters, Divine cultivated an outrageous drag queen image, with gaudy makeup, a blonde mane the texture of cotton candy, and tight dresses on his more-than-300-pound frame.

The obese transvestite character-actor Divine personified self-consciously campy underground films and ushered in a new threshold of bad taste in cinema.

Divine drag queen pop art