American actor Gary Cooper was BOTD in 1901. Born in Helena, Montana to a middle-class family, his father was a Montana Supreme Court judge. He attended Grinnell College in Iowa, leaving before graduation for Hollywood to pursue an acting career. Initially earning a winning as a cowboy extra and stunt rider, his classical good looks, rugged masculinity and physical prowess caught the eye of talent scouts, and he starred in a series of low-budget silent films, including 1927’s Wings. He rose to stardom in the 1929 Western The Virginian, and became one of Hollywood’s popular stars. He burned through the 1930s with starring roles as Marlene Dietrich‘s love interest in Morocco, the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway‘s war novel A Farewell to Arms, the male third of a love triangle in Noël Coward‘s Design for Living, a legionnaire in Beau Geste and a stoic cowboy in The Westerner. He personified the decent American everyman in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe, both directed by Frank Capra. In 1941, he won an Oscar for his role in Sergeant York, leading to more nuanced dramatic roles in The Pride of the Yankees, For Whom the Bell Tolls and a deeply strange adaptation of Ayn Rand‘s The Fountainhead. His role as the aging town marshall in 1951’s High Noon won him a second Oscar, and is now considered his greatest role. Cooper was bisexual, with an astonishingly active personal life. His first major Hollywood relationship was with Clara Bow, who helped secure him roles in Children of Divorce and Wings. In 1979, he fell passionately love with the actor Anderson Lawler. They quickly became inseparable, living together in Cooper’s apartment and becoming well-known in Hollywood circles as a couple, while Cooper pursued a simultaneous affair with the actress Lupe Vélez. For reasons that remain unclear, Anderson moved out of Cooper’s apartment and moved in with Cukor. Cooper subsequently had a nervous breakdown, convalescing in Europe before returning to Hollywood as an avowedly heterosexual leading man, having affairs with his wealthy patroness the Countess Dorothy di Frasso and his co-stars Dietrich and Carole Lombard. In 1933, he married Veronica Balfe, with whom he had a daughter, but later pursued affairs with Dietrich and his other co-stars Ingrid Bergman, Patricia Neal and Grace Kelly. Later in life, he had a relationship with the costume designer Irene, who committed suicide after his death. In 1961, he was awarded an Honorary Oscar for his contribution to Hollywood film. He died a few months later, aged 60. Now considered one of the greatest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, he became the archetype for the “strong silent type” of American manhood.