Divine, the 21-stone drag artist who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 42, won a cult following through his appearances in American underground films.

Once voted 'the filthiest person alive,' Divine built his reputation on the ability to shock. But it was, he claimed, part of a calculated assault on what he saw as American materalism and hypocrisy.

He always disliked being labelled a transvestite and insisted that cha-cha heels and thigh-splitting spandex dresses were purely 'work clothes' designed to make people laugh.

He was born Harris Glen Milstead and started his career as a hairdresser in Baltimore, Maryland. The film director John Waters, who had been at school with him, devised his professional name.

Made during the 1970s, the Waters/Divine films were deliberately raucous, crudely made and sexually explicit but achieved a critical respectability as a searing portrait of a sick society. They included Desperate Living, a tale of rape, murder and cannibalism, and Female Trouble, in which Divine played a delinquent schoolgirl who is violated by a struck driver and ends up in the electric chair.

More recently he had played male roles, as in the 1986 film Trouble in Mind, while his latest picture, Hairspray, though directed by Waters, took him closer to the Hollywood mainstream. A nostalgic look at Baltimore in the early 1960s, it was released in America last month and has been a commercial and critical success.

Divine was also a night club performer and made several records, including 'You Think You're a Man' and 'Walk Like a Man' - which helped to popularize the 'hi-energy' style in rock music.