American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was BOTD in 1941. Born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota to a middle-class Jewish family, he moved to New York in 1961, renaming himself after the poet Dylan Thomas and posing as a Dustbowl-era folk balladeer in the tradition of his hero Woodie Guthrie. He took the Greenwich Village music scene by storm and was quickly signed to Columbia Records, releasing his first self-penned album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963. His hit songs Blowin’ In the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin’ became synonymous with the civil rights and anti-war movements, making him an uneasy hero of the emerging counterculture. In 1965, he baffled his fans by “going electric”, seen as a betrayal of his folk fanbase. His subsequent albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited defiantly embraced a rock-n-roll sound. His 1965 single Like a Rolling Stone, a rock-influenced snarl of contempt at his critics, became an international hit, confirming his abandonment of the folk and protest-song genres. His 1966 album Blonde on Blonde embraced the artificiality and excess of the Pop Art movement, as he partied with Andy Warhol and adopted a playfully androgynous on-stage persona. Following a motorcycle accident, he disappeared from public view for two years, re-emerging in 1969 with a mellower country-rock sound. In 1973 he appeared in the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, penning the hit song Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door for its soundtrack. He returned to chart-topping form with his albums Blood on the Tracks and Desire, accompanied by a now legendary North American tour, announcing shows in radio interviews only hours before appearing. His celebrity dimmed in the 1980s as he embraced evangelical Christianity and recorded gospel music. He returned to croak his way though the 1985 all-star charity recording We Are the World, and as a member of Dad-rock group The Travelling Wilburys. His 1997 album Time Out of Mind marked a partial return to his folk-music roots, winning high praise and the Grammy for Album of the Year. He won an Oscar in 2000 for his song Things Have Changed, written for the film Wonder Boys. In 2016, he became the first songwriter to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, completing his deification as the most influential singer-songwriter of the 20th century. Married twice and with six children, his reputed affairs with Joan Baez, Marianne Faithfull and Edie Sedgwick have prompted extensive speculation. He has also been hailed as a queer icon for his identification with Otherness, his lyrical allusions to queer poets Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud and his loving (though non-sexual) friendship with gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Resistant to traditional film biopics, he was portrayed by six actors in Todd Haynes’ 2007 film I’m Not There, most notably by Cate Blanchett as the androgynous electric-era Dylan. In 2023, he was portrayed as a heterosexual horndog by Timothée Chalamet in the more traditional biopic A Complete Unknown.