Orange Is The New Black star Laverne Cox was in the red

The American star, who is credited as the most famous transgender actress to-date and also the first transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy award, landed the part of Sophia in OITNB, a transgender woman behind bars for credit card fraud, in 2012.

Before hitting the big time in the Netflix series, she told the Radio Times about her tough times, saying: “When I booked the job (in late 2012), I was in rent arrears.

“I’d got an eviction notice earlier that year and had to go to housing court for the second time in my life to keep from being evicted from my apartment. I was basically nine months behind on rent.”

Laverne, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2014 alongside the headline: The Transgender Tipping Point, also recently made headlines with a blog post she wrote about Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover.

Caitlyn, formerly known as Olympic athlete Bruce, made her transgender debut on the magazine’s cover in March.

Laverne took to Tumblr, agreeing with the comments saying Caitlyn looked gorgeous, but, she wrote: “This has made me reflect critically on my own desires to ‘work a photo shoot’, to serve up various forms of glamour, power, sexiness, body affirming, racially empowering images of the various sides of my black, trans womanhood.”

Commenting on her post, she told Radio Times: “Even in good lighting I’m an obviously transgender person – I have a deep voice, I have broad shoulders, I have big hands, I have big feet.

“I don’t think any of those things makes me less of a woman.

“I wrote that blog to encourage people to think about critically about how we talk about trans identity.”