American lyricist Lorenz Hart was BOTD in 1895. Born in Harlem, New York City, to German Jewish immigrant parents, he attended private schools and went to Columbia College. Turned down for the US Army for being too short, he went to Columbia University to study journalism. In 1918, when he was 23, Hart met 16 year-old fellow student Richard Rodgers. They began writing songs together, co-writing the Columbia varsity show in 1920. They had their first Broadway success with the 1925 revue The Garrick Gaieties, featuring the song Manhattan, which became a popular hit. Over the next 20 years, they produced a series of hit musicals including Babes in Arms, The Boys From Syracuse, Pal Joey, and On Your Toes. During the 1930s, they relocated to Hollywood, writing songs for the films Love Me Tonight, The Phantom President, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, and Mississippi. Unusually for their time, most of their hit songs – notably The Lady Is a Tramp, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered and My Funny Valentine – were written for musicals or films, with Blue Moon being their only independently produced hit. Described as a “fast-talking, ­cigar-chomping, easy-laughing, profanity-­spilling bon vivant”, Hart struggled with his homosexuality for most of his life. While in Hollywood, he befriended gay celebrities Tallulah Bankhead, William Haines and Gene Malin, though a blackmail attempt drove him back into the closet. He lived with his mother until her death in 1943, avoiding intimate relationships and trawling his way through chorus boys and sex workers procured for him by his friend Milton G. “Doc” Bender. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of his lyrics were the confessional outpourings of a hopeless romantic, continually disappointed in love. Biographers are generally agreed that Hart also had a crush on the robustly heterosexual Rodgers, which may also have inspired his melancholy, heartbroken lyrics. Unlike his contemporary Cole Porter, he avoided sexual innuendoes in his writing, though queer subtext can be interpreted in many songs, including Manhattan (“We’ll go to Greenwich, / Where modern men itch / To be free”). An alcoholic of Olympian proportions, Hart would regularly disappear for weeks at a time on drinking binges, seriously affecting his work output. In 1943, an exasperated Rodgers ended their partnership and teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. Later that year, he was persuaded to reunite with Hart to work on a revival of their musical A Connecticut Yankee. After the premiere, Hart went on an all-night drinking binge in wintry Manhattan, contracting pneumonia and dying four days later, aged 48. Now considered one of the greatest songwriting partnerships of the 20th century, Lorenz and Hart’s songs have become staples of the Great American Songbook, with memorable recordings by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Blossom Dearie,  Sammy Davis Jr. and Barbra Streisand. Chet Baker’s celebrated 1954 cover of My Funny Valentine is notable for its sexual ambiguity, as the androgynous-voiced Baker mournfully serenades the male beloved of the title. Hart was portrayed by Mickey Rooney as a love-struck heterosexual in the 1948 biopic Words and Music, and by Ethan Hawke as a despairing gay alcoholic in the 2025 film Blue Moon.