English filmmaker John Schlesinger was BOTD in 1926. Born in London to a middle-class Jewish family, he was educated at private schools before joining the Army in World War Two, where he made short films at the front line. After the war, he studied at Oxford University, where he joined the drama society. Initially pursuing a career as an actor, he had small roles in British films and television. In the late 1950s, he began making documentaries for the BBC, including Terminus, which won a prize at the Venice Film Festival, and a profile of gay composer Benjamin Britten. He had a stunning run of success in the 1960s as the director of films A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar and Darling, establishing him as a leading figure in the British New Wave. He also launched the careers of Alan Bates, Tom Courtney and Julie Christie, with whom he frequently collaborated. His 1976 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Far From the Madding Crowd, starring Christie, Bates, Terence Stamp and Peter Finch, was also a success. He attained international success with 1969’s Midnight Cowboy, a drama about two hustlers living on the fringes of New York City. Highly acclaimed, it won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Returning to the UK, he made Sunday Bloody Sunday, a frank and unsentimental portrait of a ménage-a-trois between a closeted gay man, a single woman and the young man whom they share as a lover. Highly acclaimed on its release, it was one of the first feature films to show two men kissing. He had further success with Marathon Man, a psychological thriller starring Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, but made a series of flops throughout the 1980s. Returning again to England, he directed two television films about gay spies Anthony Blunt (A Question of Attribution) and Guy Burgess (An Englishman Abroad), both scripted by Alan Bennett, and appeared in a cameo role in a TV film of David Leavitt‘s novel The Lost Language of Cranes. His final film was 2000’s The Next Best Thing, a well-meaning but flaccid melodrama starring Rupert Everett as a gay man who has a child with his best friend, appallingly played by Madonna. Schlesinger lived with his partner Michael Childers for over 30 years. He died in 2003, aged 77.