American filmmaker Michael Cimino was BOTD in 1939. Born in New York, he studied art at Michigan State University and later at Yale, before pursuing a successful career directing television commercials. He moved to Hollywood in the early 1970s, writing the screenplays for Silent Running and Magnum Force. His 1974 debut film as writer-director, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, was a success, launching him to wider attention. He is best known for his 1978 film The Deer Hunter, a searing drama about working-class steelworkers whose lives are destroyed by the Vietnam War. Featuring a forty-minute Armenian wedding sequence and a harrowing scene of soldiers playing Russian Roulette, A critical and commercial sensation, it won five Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, making stars of its young leads Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken. Cimino’s career collapsed spectacularly with his 1980 follow-up film Heaven’s Gate, a revisionist Western that bombed at the box office, bankrupted its studio and ended auteur-led filmmaking in Hollywood. He became a recluse, completing only four more feature films. Rumours circulated that he was trans and living as a woman, though these were never substantiated. A 2012 re-release of Heaven’s Gate was critically praised, leading to the rehabilitation of his reputation. He died in 2016, aged 77, survived by his wife Joan Carelli.