English actor Richard Warwick was BOTD in 1945. Born Richard Winter in Meopham, Kent, he studied drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, later joining the Royal National Theatre under the direction of Laurence Olivier. He made a spectacular film debut in Franco Zeffirelli‘s 1968 film of Shakespeare‘s Romeo and Juliet, followed by an eye-catching role as a gay man in Lindsay Anderson’s satire If…. He took a leading role in the 1970 sex comedy The Breaking of Bumbo, co-starring Joanna Lumley. A critical and commercial failure, it damaged his prospects for further leading roles. He appeared in the 1971 film Nicolas and Alexandra, playing gay aristocrat Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, one of the assassins of Grigori Rasputin. He appeared in two films by Derek Jarman, playing a Roman soldier who falls unrequitedly in love with Saint Sebastian in 1976’s Sebastiane, and a 1979 adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He also appeared in British TV sitcoms Please Sir!, A Fine Romance and a serialisation of Last of the Mohicans. He worked mainly in theatre throughout the 1980s, starring in Pygmalion, The Merchant of Venice and the original West End production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. In the 1990s, he had brief roles in Zeffirelli’s films Hamlet and Jane Eyre, and appeared in the TV adaptation of David Leavitt‘s novel The Lost Language of Cranes, directed by Sean Mathias. Openly gay since forever, he was in a long-term relationship with the actor and director Keith Baxter. He died in 1997 from an AIDS-related illness, aged 52.