American playwright Thomas Lanier Williams, better known by his pseudonym Tennessee Williams, was BOTD in 1911. Born in Mississippi, he was raised in St Louis, Missouri. His father abandoned the family home, leaving Williams and his mentally ill sister Rose to be raised by his mother. He studied at the University of Missouri and Washington University, dropping out to pursue a career as a writer. He first play Battle of Angels was produced in 1940 but poorly received. His breakthrough came in 1943 with The Glass Menagerie, a lyrical and emotionally devastating based on his unhappy upbringing. (When his mother objected to her portrayal as a frustrated Southern Belle, Williams assigned her the royalties to the play). He electrified Broadway with his 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, a heated melodrama about the fading beauty Blanche du Bois, whose fantasies of romance and refinement are destroyed by her brutal alpha-male brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski. Audiences were shocked by Williams’ unvarnished references to rape, homosexuality and the eroticisation of violence. The 1951 film version made an international star of Marlon Brando as Stanley, whose performance became a landmark in screen acting. Williams continued his success with plays about repressed sexuality, addiction and unfulfilled desire, with an explicitly queer resonance. His next play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof portrayed an alcoholic sports star unable to have sex with his wife and obsessed with his dead male friend. The film version, starring Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, was another huge success, despite redactions in Williams’ text to remove references to the lead character’s homosexuality. Suddenly Last Summer featured a controlling mother trying to cover up her dead son’s homosexuality by lobotomising the younger woman who procured men for him. The 1959 film version again featured Taylor, co-starring with Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn, with the faceless gay son ripped to pieces offscreen for his sexual crimes. Williams’ novel The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, filmed with Vivian Leigh in 1961, was less well-received, while his play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, filmed by Joseph Losey in 1968 as Boom! and starring Taylor, Richard Burton and Noël Coward, was a critical and commercial disaster. Openly queer and with a hefty dose of guilt and self-hatred, Williams struggled throughout his life with alcohol and drug addiction. He had affairs with Ned Rorem and a 14-year relationship with Italian-American actor Frank Merlo, remaining together until Merlo’s death in 1963. Williams died in 1983 from an accidental drug overdose, aged 71. Now considered the greatest American playwright of the 20th century, his work is widely performed around the world, with even the lamentable Boom! reclaimed as a camp classic.