"They always give me boy parts and I like them better than just being a girl. They got a series of boy pictures ready and asked me what name I wanted to have in them and I said ‘Billy.’ So the series was named ‘The Adventures of Billy’ and I’ve been called ‘Billy’ ever since that by everybody.” Thus spoke fourteen-year-old stage and film actor Edna “Billy” Foster to a journalist from the in July 1914. Foster seems to be a rare case of an assigned-female performer who played almost exclusively boy roles: they were promoted under a boy’s name and often taken for a boy by critics and fans. After 1915, Foster dropped out of the film industry and public life. I use the pronoun “they” for Foster throughout this booklet because we can’t tell from surviving primary sources what gender Foster identified as. By July 1914, Foster had appeared in at least 25 film roles, playing a boy in at least 15 of them.Twenty-three of these were at the Biograph Company in New York City, mostly under the direction of D.W. Griffith, and the other two were at Reliance. The Biograph Company never advertised the names of their performers, so critics and audiences seem to have taken Foster for a boy. Critics praised the realism of the boy’s performances and fans wrote to magazines to find out the identity of the boy player. For example, the New York Dramatic Mirror praised “the appealing and lifelike presentation of the little boy” in The Baby and the Stork (included in this set). In the only interview I have been able to find, Foster and their older sister Flora (also an actor) emphasize how boyish Billy is. Foster says: “I love to play with boys and outside of school I always do. I like base-ball and rugby.” Flora adds: “And she drives a big Packard. [...] She really is just like a boy.” Even the journalist pipes in, admiring Billy’s muscle: “It was a muscle that a boy of more than Billy’s age would be proud of; round and hard as the proverbial rock.”