American musician and performer Liberace was BOTD in 1919. Born Władziu Valentino Liberace in West Allis, Wisconsin to Polish and Italian immigrant parents, he began playing the piano at four and was a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by his teens. Unbeknownst to his parent, he began playing piano in strip clubs, discovering a love of tacky showmanship and sex with anonymous men. In the 1940s, he transitioned to performing in nightclubs and hotels, presenting easy-listening arrangements of classical music “with the boring bits left out” and medleys combining Chopin sonatas with popular songs like Home on the Range. By the 1950s, he was a major star, commanding huge fees for concerts in New York and Las Vegas, dressed in elaborate costumes and playing rhinestone-covered pianos atopped with candelabras. Critically savaged for his kitschy showmanship, he was adored by middle-class American audiences, whom he invited onstage after his shows to admire his costumes and jewellery. He parlayed his success into the television series The Liberace Show, first broadcast in 1952, engaging audiences by talking directly into the lens, and creating visual interest with costume changes, dramatic lighting and exaggerated hand movements. He sensibly retaining the syndication rights for Stateside and international broadcast, making him massively wealthy. After a brief and unsuccessful attempt at a film career, he returned to Las Vegas in 1963, hiring the then-unknown Barbra Streisand as his support act. In 1966, he made an entertaining if bizarre cameo as identical twin pianists in the cult TV series Batman. Adopting the maxim “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”, he built a series of extravagantly decorated homes, including a version of Michelangelo‘s The Creation of Man painted on the ceiling of his Las Vegas mansion. Politically conservative and intent on retaining his wholesome Mid-Western persona, he kept his homosexuality a secret, employing his boyfriends as “assistants” before tiring of them and replacing them with younger models. He aggressively pursued and stamped out rumours about his sexuality, successfully suing the UK’s Daily Mirror in 1959 after being referred to as “a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.” He had a five-year relationship with Scott Thorson, whom he met in 1976 when he was 57 and Thorson was 18, evicting him in 1981 over concerns about Thorson’s drug use. Thorson sued Liberace for palimony, later settling out of court. Diagnosed with HIV in 1985, Liberace fought to keep his illness a secret until his death in 1987 aged 67. The following year, Thorson published a tell-all memoir, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, revealing Liberace’s life of Baroque excess, casual sex and addiction to plastic surgery. He was played by Michael Douglas in the 2013 film Behind the Candelabra, based on Thorson’s book.