American heiress and socialite Winnaretta Singer was BOTD in 1865. Born in upstate New York, she was the 20th child of Isaac Singer, founded of the Singer sewing machine empire. She had a privileged upbringing, raised largely in Paris and rural England, inheriting a multi-million dollar fortune when she was 18. Openly lesbian since forever, she was briefly married to the Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard, whom she threatened to kill on their wedding night, before entering into a marriage of convenience with the much older and discreetly gay Prince Edmond de Polignac. both devoted patrons of the arts, she and Polignac hosted legendary salons in Paris, supporting the careers of Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc, and hosting celebrity gays including Marcel Proust, Isadora Duncan, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev and Colette. She also commissioned a number of public housing projects in Paris, appointing Le Corbusier to building public shelters for the Salvation Army. During World War One, she worked with Marie Curie to convert limousines into mobile radiology units to help wounded soldiers at the front, and commissioned the construction of the Foch Hospital during World War Two. She also clocked an astonishing number of lovers, including socialite Olga de Meyer, painter Romaine Brooks, composer Ethel Smyth, pianist Renata Borgatti, novelist Violet Trefusis, garden designer Alvilde Chaplin and novelist Virginia Woolf. She died in 1943 aged 78.