American artist Don Bachardy was BOTD in 1934. Born in Los Angeles, he identified as gay from an early age, and became obsessed with collecting autographs of film stars. In 1952, aged 18, he met English expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood at a trip to the beach. Despite, or perhaps because of their 30-year age gap, they became lovers, and began living together a few months later. Bachardy embraced the father-son dynamic of their relationship, even adopting Isherwood’s strangulated upper-class English accent. Isherwood encouraged Bachardy’s love of drawing, paying for him to attend the Chouinard Art Institute and the Slade Art School in London. He had his first solo art show in London in 1961, and became a renowned painter, creating portraits of Isherwood’s celebrity friends including W. H. Auden, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Montgomery Clift, Igor Stravinsky, Laurence Olivier and Bette Davis (who said “There’s the old bag” when he showed her his drawing.) Their social circle included gay luminaries E. M. Forster, W. Somerset Maugham, Truman Capote, Anthony Perkins and Tennessee Williams, who arranged for Bachardy to be an extra in the 1955 film adaptation of The Rose Tattoo. Their loving but turbulent relationship formed the inspiration for Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man, in which a middle-aged gay man confronts life after the sudden death of his younger lover. In 1973, they co-wrote the screenplay for the TV film Frankenstein: The True Story, a queer reading of Frankenstein incorporating elements of Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray. They lived together for 33 years, until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Their lives were profiled in the 2007 documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story, in which Bachardy shared details of their open relationship, his drug-fuelled meeting with Paul Bowles in Tangier and his sketches of Isherwood’s corpse. He had a cameo in Tom Ford’s 2009 film adaptation of A Single Man, renewing interest in his and Isherwood’s work. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Bachardy continues to live and work in Santa Monica, in the home he shared with Isherwood.