French actress and filmmaker Jeanne Moreau was BOTD in 1928. Born in Paris to a French father and an English mother, her parents separated when she was a teenager, and she was raised by her mother. She studied at the Conservatoire de Paris before joining the Comédie-Française, becoming a theatrical star in her 20s. After a series of minor film roles, she became a major star in Louis Malle’s 1958 thriller Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), followed by the romantic drama Les Amants (The Lovers) in 1959. Both roles emphasised her melancholy beauty and smouldering sexuality, accompanied by press attention about her affair with Malle. She became an icon of mid-century European cinema, admired on- and offscreen for her intelligence, husky voice and fearless approach to tackling sexual taboos. Her most famous roles include a woman in a long-term love triangle in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, an unhappy wife in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (The Night), a sexually adventurous servant in Luis Buñuel’s Le journal d’une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid), a scheming villainess in Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons), a gambling addict in Jacques Demy’s La baie des anges (The Bay of Angels), an enigmatic prostitute in Joseph Losey’s Eva and a repressed schoolteacher in Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle. She maintained long-term friendships with playwrights Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet, appearing in stage performances of their works, and collaborated with writer Marguerite Duras on film versions of Moderato Cantabile, L’Amant (The Lover) and Nathalie Granger. She continued acting into her 80s, working with Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Luc Besson, Ismail Merchant and François Ozon, and directed two feature films. Moreau was married twice: to the actor Jean-Louis Richard, with whom she had a son, and the director William Friedkin. She also had highly publicised relationships with her directors Malle, Truffaut and Richardson (who left his wife, the actress Vanessa Redgrave, to be with Moreau), jazz musician Miles Davis and fashion designer Pierre Cardin, and was rumoured to have had an affair with German singer Nico. She died in 2017, aged 89.