Austrian actor Helmut Berger was BOTD in 1944. Born in Bad Ischl in Nazi-occupied Austria, his father joined the Axis Forces shortly after his birth, and was imprisoned in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp until 1947. Mistreated by his father and expelled from a string of schools, Berger ran away to Switzerland in his teens, then moved to London to take acting lessons. In 1964, he moved to Italy to study at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, where he began a relationship with filmmaker Luchino Visconti. They lived together at Visconti’s palazzo in Rome, usually in separate quarters to keep their relationship secret from the servants. After a brief role in Visconti’s film Le streghe (The Witches), Berger became an overnight star in Götterdämmerung (The Damned), Visconti’s feverish melodrama charting the decline of an industrialist family, based on the Nazi-supporting Krupps dynasty. As the dissolute and rampantly homosexual Martin von Essenbeck (inspired by notorious homosexual Friedrich Krupp), Berger stole the film from more established stars Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, memorably appearing in drag as Marlene Dietrich from The Blue Angel. (Dietrich was so impressed with Berger’s performance that she sent him an autographed photo with the inscription “Who’s prettier? Love Marlene”). With his ice-blue eyes, killer cheekbones, feline elegance and air of sexual perversity, Berger became one of the most compelling actors in post-war European cinema. In 1970, he had back-to-back successes as the lead in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the historical epic The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Reteaming with Visconti, he uglied up to play mad queer monarch Ludwig II of Bavaria in Ludwig. Transferring effortlessly to English-language films, he played suave Eurotrash seducers opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Ash Wednesday and Glenda Jackson in Joseph Losey‘s The Romantic Englishwoman. The unofficial It-Boy of the 1970s jetset, he partied with Andy Warhol at The Factory and was the first male cover star of American Vogue, appearing alongside his then-girlfriend Marisa Berenson. His relationship with Visconti was fascinatingly explored in the latter’s 1974 film Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece), in which Berger’s young radical becomes the love-object of an older closeted aristocrat. An Olympian-level cocaine user, he was famous for cutting lines with a gold razor blade and snorting them through a gold straw made for him by Bulgari, which he wore on a chain around his neck. After Visconti’s death in 1976 and the slowing of his own career, he battled with addiction and depression, nearly dying from a drug overdose. He made a career comeback (of sorts) as a drug-addled playboy in 1980s TV soap opera Dynasty, a supporting role in The Godfather Part III and appeared in Madonna‘s controversial 1992 coffee table book Sex. His final roles included an elderly gay man taunted by fascist thugs in Initiation, a duke overseeing aristocratic debauchery in Liberty, and the elderly Yves Saint-Laurent in the 2014 biopic Saint Laurent. In his tell-all 1998 biography Me, Berger claimed to have had sexual liaisons with Rudolf Nureyev, Britt Ekland, Ursula Andress, Tab Hunter, Linda Blair, Jerry Hall and both Bianca and Mick Jagger. He was also briefly married to Italian writer and model Francesca Guidato. He died in 2023, aged 78.