Russian ballet producer Sergei Diaghilev was BOTD in 1872. Born in the Chudovsky District to an aristocratic family, he started composing music in his teens and studied at the St Petersburg Imperial University. While a student, he curated several exhibitions of Russian art, including a highly successful 1906 show in Paris. He began producing theatre and ballet performances, launching his own company, the Paris-based Ballets Russes, in 1909. His productions revolutionised 20th century theatre, making a superstar of his lead dancer and lover Vaslav Nijinsky. With an expert eye for emerging talent, he commissioned work from composers Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Erik Satie and artists Léon Bakst and Pablo Picasso. The 1914 ballet The Rite of Spring, featuring atonal music by Stravinsky and jarring choreography by Nijinsky, caused a riot at its Paris premiere, and is widely viewed as the symbolic “birth” of Modernism. Portly, impeccably dressed and conspicuously charming, with a signature streak of white hair that earned him the nickname “Chinchilla”, Diaghilev was also a tyrant and a bully who brooked no opposition. Nijinsky, desperate to escape Diaghilev’s influence, impulsively married a woman while on tour in South America. An irate Diaghilev fired him via telegram, replacing him with his younger lovers Mikhail Fokine and Léonide Massine. Like many notorious homosexuals, he lived lavishly, spending more than he earned and living from month to month to keep his company afloat. Notoriously superstitious, he lived with his nanny until her death and avoided travel by boat after a fortune-teller predicted he would die in water. He died in 1929 (in water-logged Venice) aged 57. One of the most influential producers of the 20th century, he has been portrayed many times onscreen, notably by Alan Bates in the 1980 biopic Nijinsky. He is thought to be the inspiration for Boris Lermontov, the obsessive ballet impresario in Powell & Pressburger’s 1944 film The Red Shoes.