English writer William (W.) Somerset Maugham was BOTD in 1874. Born and raised in Paris to a prosperous middle-class family, he was educated in England and Germany, qualifying as a doctor in London. An inheritance freed him from the requirement to earn a living, and he published his first novel Liza of Lambeth in 1897. He published a number of novels, including 1915’s Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical drama about a crippled medical student who falls in love with a heartless working-class waitress. During World War One, Maugham worked for the British Red Cross in France, where he met Gerald Haxton, a young American who became his long-term partner. He also had a three-year affair with Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had a daughter. Recruited by the British Secret Service, he travelled to Asia and the Pacific, eventually settling in France with Haxton. In the 1920s, he became a successful playwright, at one point having four plays running simultaneously in London’s West End. He abandoned playwriting in the 1930s to concentrate on novels and short stories, typically about unhappily married women seeking sexual fulfilment via affairs. His work combined a crisp, lucid prose style with a compassionate and unsentimental view of human sexuality, considered daring for his time. Many of his works were filmed in his lifetime: the 1934 film Of Human Bondage made a star of the young Bette Davis, who later starred in an adaptation of his story The Letter, while Greta Garbo had an early hit with an adaptation of The Painted Veil. His 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge, a drama about a young American man who abandons his bourgeois life to pursue spiritual enlightenment in the Far East, was inspired by Maugham’s interest in Sanskrit religious texts. A 1946 film followed, directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb and Elsa Lanchester, with Herbert Marshall playing Maugham as a character in his own story. After Haxton’s death in 1944, Maugham installed his 23 year-old secretary Alan Searle as his live-in lover. Outliving many of his younger literary contemporaries, he died in 1965, aged 91. His works continue to be filmed, notably a 2006 adaptation of The Painted Veil with a screenplay by Ron Nyswaner.