American actor Franklin Pangborn was BOTD in 1889. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he became an actor as a teenager, joining Mildred Holland’s stock theatre company. He joined the Army during World War One, fighting in the Battle of Argonne, and was discharged after he was wounded and gassed. After the war, he worked in theatre before heading to Hollywood. By the 1930s, he was an established film actor, typically playing fastidiously dressed prissy queens, providing comic relief in comedies include Design for Living, My Man Godfrey and Just Around the Corner. His performance as an officious hotel clerk in International House and a swishy interior decorator who arrives at a party with a handsome male escort in Only Yesterday, are thought to be the first expressly gay characters in Hollywood film. He also appeared regularly in Preston Sturges comedies in the 1940s. Pangborn lived in Laguna Beach with his mother and occasional boyfriends. He died in 1958, aged 69.