English actress, presenter and activist Joanna Lumley was BOTD in 1946. Born in Srinagar, Kashmir in British-controlled India, her father and grandfather served in the British Indian Army. Despatched to boarding school in England when she was eight, she applied unsuccessfully to drama school in her teens, before starting a successful modelling career. She made her film debut in 1969 as a Bond Girl in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, leading to work in Hammer Horror films. She became better known in the 1970s playing glamorous secret agents in TV series The New Avengers and Sapphire & Steel, with cameo appearances in Coronation Street, Are You Being Served?, Steptoe and Son and The Two Ronnies. After wafting through the 1980s, she had a stunning career renaissance in the 1990s TV comedy Absolutely Fabulous, written by and co-starring Jennifer Saunders. Lumley’s character Patsy Stone, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking and rampantly libidinous fashion magazine director with a giant beehive hairdo, became instantly iconic, winning Lumley two BAFTA TV awards and imitated by countless drag queens. The show became an international phenomenon, playing for five series, various one-off specials and a 2016 film, adored by audiences and admired by critics for its satire of the fashion industry, transgressive sexual politics and celebration of female friendship. In subsequent series, Saunders and Lumley played on the queer resonances of Patsy’s character, notably a flashback to 1970s Marrakech where Patsy appears to have become a trans man, or a scene in New York where a group of drag queens welcome her as one of their own. Offscreen, Lumley has become well-known for her activism for humanitarian and environmental causes, leading a 2008 campaign to allow Nepalese Gurkha Army veterans the right to settle in Britain. She has also hosted a series of popular travel programmes, employing her upper-crust accent and cut-glass diction in innumerable voice-overs for TV adverts. Awarded the BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, she became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2022 for services to drama, entertainment and charity. Lumley was briefly married to director Jeremy Lloyd in the 1970s, and has been married to conductor Stephen Barlow since 1986. Warmly supportive of her LGBTQ fanbase, she earns Honorary SuperGay status for embracing her inner drag queen and helping popularise queer humour.