updated: 02/12/2007
Conwomen, hitwomen, spies and private eyes are sometimes mistresses of disguise: characters who adopt multiple disguises in the course of a movie. The disguises themselves may involve complex prosthetics (eg Mr Magoo), mask tricks (eg Die Diebin) or simply repeated changes of wigs (eg Arabella).
As with all disguises in the movies, we have to play along for them to work: eg in Marnie the changes are only sufficient to tell us that the character is supposed to be disguised and who would have been fooled face-to-face by the discarded mask in Penelope.