See Also: Felicity Huffman (Lynette Scavo) People Guide

Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman (Lynette Scavo) this weekend was honored with the Best Actress award at the Tribeca Film Festival, for her role in the new indie film Transamerica.

In the movie, Huffman plays Bree, a conservative transsexual woman who goes on an unexpected road trip when she learns that she's got a son who she fathered when she was still a he. The son is a teenage hustler in New York who's just been arrested, and Bree heads over from her native Los Angeles to get him out of jail. The film already attracted a lot of media attention before its premiere at Tribeca, and has now apparently also succeeded in winning over the festival's judges, including Sheryl Crow and Whoopi Goldberg. According to AP, other winners at the festival included the Chinese feature film Stolen Life, and the gay-themed Dutch movie Simon.

As part of her media tour for Transamerica, Huffman also spoke to online magazine Salon.com, and for about half of the interview talked about her role on Desperate Housewives. The actress said that one of the most important effects of the show's success has been to brighten prospects for women over 35 in Hollywood. "I don't ever think that it's going to turn into: Hey, 20-year-olds aren't valued, 40-year-olds are valued!," she admitted. "But it used to be that the glass ceiling was 40 and now it's more like 50 and I think maybe in the future it will be 60. Desperate Housewives -- god bless [series creator] Marc Cherry -- has changed the landscape of pilot season. Friends have called me to say, "Thank you, thank you. I'm going out on so many more auditions now," because there are so many parts for women over 35."

Huffman wasn't quite sure about the reason DH was able to get off the ground in the first place, at a time when it was still difficult for middle-aged women to get cast in challenging roles. But she did offer an unexpected explanation: "[Here's] an angle, though I'm not sure this is it. I think gay men appreciate women differently than straight guys do. It's funny; we're not the objects of their sexual desires, but they always consider us sexual objects. They appreciate women. And I think that because it's OK now to be gay in Hollywood -- and that's taken a while -- that finally maybe there are opportunities now for Marc Cherrys to be the source for a series."

"I think gay men write women differently and appreciate them," Huffman continued, "and maybe it took them getting in a creative position of power for us to be seen that way. I think Sex and the City is the same thing. Those women were younger, but not a lot. And there's [Sex and the City creator] Darren Starr. So I wonder if it has something to do with it."

More from Huffman, including a dismissal of the infamous Vanity Fair article, and her thoughts on the Lynette Scavo role, can be found in the full Salon.com interview, which is available once you watch a full-screen ad.

Discuss this news item at Talk Desperate!
 Add Get Desperate! RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!