English actor and memoirist Dirk Bogarde was BOTD in 1921. Born Derek van den Bogaerde in London to a middle-class family of Flemish descent, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Arts before pursuing a career as an actor. He served in the British Army during World War Two, working as an intelligence officer for Field Marshal Montgomery, and was among the first Allied officers to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, he signed with the Rank Organisation, becoming a popular star, best known as a medical student in the Doctor in the House comedy film series. In the 1960s, he abandoned his matinée idol image, taking roles in a series of groundbreaking films. In 1961’s Victim, he played a closeted gay barrister being blackmailed over his relationship with a younger man. One of the first films to deal openly with homosexuality, it was credited with rousing public support for the decriminalisation of anti-sodomy laws. He had similar success with Joseph Losey‘s film The Servant, a disturbing chamber piece scripted by Harold Pinter about the codependent and homoerotic relationship between James Fox’s upper class toff and Bogarde’s amoral manservant. He returned to romantic lead territory in John Schlesinger’s 1965 film Darling, playing the married lover of Julie Christie. He had a long and fruitful collaboration with Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, appearing in Götterdämmerung (The Damned), an melodrama about the rise of Nazism, and Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice), based on Thomas Mann‘s novella about a middle-aged man’s fatal obsession with an adolescent boy. His most controversial role was in Liliana Cavani’s 1974 psychodrama The Night Porter, playing a former Nazi guard who rekindles a sado-masochistic affair with a female prisoner. The boldness of Bogarde’s artistic choices and his willingness to play gays and perverts was at odds with his private life. Discreetly gay, he never publicly acknowledged his sexuality, referring in his memoirs to long-term partner Anthony Norwood as his butler. His refusal to enter into a lavender marriage was possibly a reason for his failure to become a success in Hollywood. He spent many years caring for Norwood until the latter’s death in 1988. Bogarde died in 1999, aged 78.