American costume designer, actress and writer Natacha Rambova was BOTD in 1897. Born Winifred Shaughnessy to a Mormon family in Salt Lake City, Utah, she was raised in San Francisco and educated in England.After seeing ballerina Anna Pavlova performing in Swan Lake, she decided to become a dancer, studying with Theodore Kosloff in New York City, joining his Imperial Russian Ballet Company and changing her name. She began a relationship with Kosloff, outraging her mother her threatened to have him deported on statutory rape charges. Kosloff and Rambova fled to Hollywood, where they worked as costume and set designers for filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Her work attracted the attention of actress-filmmaker Alla Nazimova, who hired her to design the set and costumes for the 1920 comedy Billions. They collaborated again on films of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Oscar Wilde‘s play Salomé, drawing from Aubrey Beardsley‘s illustrations and and the work of modernist painter and set designer Léon Bakst. Rambova and Nazimova became lovers, socialising with a lesbian friendship circle including Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne and Greta Garbo. Rambova later attempted to leave Kosloff, who threatened to kill her and shot her in the knee, though they (alarmingly) stayed together for a further six months. In 1921, she designed costumes for Nazimova’s film Camille, starring silent film superstar Rudolph Valentino. They began a relationship and married in 1922, sparking bigamy charges due to Valentino’s previous marriage to lesbian actress Jean Acker. Their union was annulled, and they remarried in 1923. Rambova took control of Valentino’s career, overseeing the design of his films and demanding high salaries from movie studios. She was, perhaps unfairly, blamed for the failure of his subsequent films and eventually banned from his sets, leading to an acrimonious divorce in 1925. In 1926, she produced and starred in the film Do Clothes Make the Women?. A box office flop, it was followed by Valentino’s sudden death months later. Grief-stricken, Rambova left Hollywood for New York City, publishing a memoir in which she claimed to have communicated with Valentino in the afterlife via a seance. She opened her own fashion house in Manhattan, closing the business in 1932 and moving to France. She married Spanish aristocrat Álvaro de Urzáis later that year, living in Mallorca where she restored abandoned villas. After a trip to the pyramids at Luxor, she became a scholar of Egyptology, translating tomb inscriptions, publishing articles, editing books and lecturing on Egyptian mythology and religion. She moved to New Milford, Connecticut in 1957, continuing to write and research. In her later years, she suffered from paranoid delusions, anorexia and malnutrition, and was moved to a nursing home in Pasadena, California. She died in 1966 aged 69. Largely forgotten after her death, interest in her life and work was revived by feminist and queer film scholars.