American actor John Dall was BOTD in 1920. Born John Thompson in New York City, he grew up in Panama City, where his father worked on the construction of an airport. After his father’s suicide in 1929, Dall and his family returned to New York. He studied briefly at Columbia University, before leaving to pursue an acting career. He spent six years in stock companies, making his Broadway debut in 1941, and taking his first leading role in a 1942 touring production of The Eve of St Mark. He made his film debut opposite Bette Davis in The Corn Is Green, an adaptation of Emlyn Williams‘ play about a schoolteacher in a Welsh mining town who mentors a promising young student. Highly praised, his performance earned him an Oscar nomination, and he seemed destined for movie stardom, though his unease with Hollywood, preference for theatre and relative openness about his homosexuality resulted in his making only eight feature films. He is best known for his role as a suave gay murderer in Alfred Hitchcock‘s thriller Rope, based on real-life murderous gay couple Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Dall and his co-star Farley Granger gleefully played up the homoerotic subtext of Arthur Laurents‘ screenplay, kickstarting a Hollywood trend for queer-coded characters as debonair villains. A moderate success on its initial release, it has since become a classic of pre-liberationist queer Hollywood cinema. He also had a prominent role in though had a prominent supporting role in Stanley Kubrick’s queer-infused Roman epic Spartacus. In his later years, Dall struggled with alcoholism, working mainly in theatre and television, He was in a long-term relationship with actor Clement Brace, remaining together until his death in 1971, aged 50.