American director Joseph Losey was BOTD in 1909. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he attended Dartmouth College and Harvard, intending to study medicine, but switched to drama. Moving to New York, he became a leading figure in the left-wing political theatre scene of the 1930s. He visited the Soviet Union in 1935, meeting directors Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht. After military service during World War Two, he relocated to Hollywood, working on a stage version of Brecht’s play Galileo starring Charles Laughton. His first two feature films, The Boy With Green Hair and a remake of Fritz Lang’s M, featured outsiders persecuted by their conservative societies. A prominent Communist, he was blacklisted by his studio in the late 1940s. Refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he left America in 1951, returning a year later to find himself unemployable. He relocated to England in 1953, remaining there for the rest of his life. After a decade making low-budget genre films, he found greater success with 1963’s The Servant, scripted by Harold Pinter and starring Dirk Bogarde. A sinister drama about a bisexual valet who dominates and destroys his aristocratic employer, its heady mix of class warfare and sexual perversity caused a sensation in newly “Swinging London”. He followed this with a series of flops: the spy comedy Modesty Blaise; Boom!, a Kabuki version of Tennessee Williams’ play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Noël Coward; and Secret Ceremony, again starring Taylor. Critically savaged at the time, Boom! has since attained a cult following as a camp classic. Losey made a triumphant return to form with 1971’sThe Go-Between, an adaptation of L. P. Hartley’s novel about a boy who unknowingly facilitates an affair between a Victorian aristocrat and a working-class farmer. Scripted by Pinter and starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, it was a critical and commercial success, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival. His erratic later career included an adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House starring Jane Fonda, the Holocaust drama Monsieur Klein with Alain Delon, and film versions of Galileo and Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Losey was married four times and had two children, and is thought to have had relationships with men, including an extended affair with Bogarde. Now considered one of the 20th century’s greatest filmmakers, his work helped usher in more open depictions of homosexuality onscreen, while remaining fascinated by sexual repression. He died in 1984, aged 75.