“I don’t want to be doing it for three hours every night.”

Sheldon got the role of Bernadette and then the hard part began. “I’m not just playing a drag queen. I’m playing a post-operative transsexual who loves and thinks as a woman. I had to get rid of the whole man thing.”

“Terence Stamp (Bernadette in the original film) did a press conference with us where he said he wanted to concentrate on the pain of a person trapped in a body of the wrong gender.

“I thought, ‘Well that’s fine for you, love, but I don’t want to be doing it for three hours every night.’”

So he researched the grande dame of Australian drag on whom the role was based, a performer named Carlotta.

“She was very glamorous, very tits and feathers. She had it all. But she also had the dignity of an old-time Hollywood star. That’s what I clung to. Dignity.”

Priscilla Queen of the killer corset, Toronto Star, 22 August 2010