American actor Tony Curtis was BOTD in 1925. Born Bernard Schwartz in New York City, his parents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Queens and the Bronx, joining a street gang in his teens, and served in the US Navy during World War Two. After the war, he studied acting at the New School in New York, where he was scouted by film studios, eventually moving to Hollywood in 1949 to pursue a film career. His dashing good looks and athleticism saw him cast as a successor to Errol Flynn, with roles as swashbuckling romantic leads in The Prince Who Was a Thief. He earned critical praise as escape artist Harry Houdini in a 1953 biopic, and impressed as an amoral press agent with Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success. His breakout role in 1957’s The Defiant Ones, as an escaped chain-gang prisoner manacled to Sidney Poitier, earned him his only Oscar nomination, and is notable for the subliminal homoerotic charge between the actors. He became a major star in the 1959 screwball comedy Some Like It Hit, co-starring Jack Lemmon, playing jazz musicians hiding from the Mob who disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band. Curtis made an outrageously beautiful woman, while simultaneously pursuing an on- and offscreen romance with co-star Marilyn Monroe. He made a bracing change of pace as a Roman slave in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus, featuring an infamous scene in which Curtis washes his naked master (a delighted-looking Laurence Olivier) who asks him if he prefers “oysters or snails”. He starred in a string of successful comedies in the early 1960s, including Operation Petticoat, The Great Imposter, Sex and the Single Girl and Boeing Boeing, followed by a series of flops. He returned to serious drama in 1968’s The Boston Strangler, though was unable to maintain his star status, taking supporting roles in TV films and the drama series Vega$. Married and divorced six times and with six children, his most notable relationship was with first wife Janet Leigh, with whom he had a daughter, the actress Jamie Lee Curtis. After decades of problems with alcoholism and drug abuse, he became a high-profile clients of the Betty Ford Clinic, finally achieving sobriety in the mid 1980s. Later in life, he cheerfully admitted to trying out oysters as well as snails, remaining playfully tight-lipped about the identities of his male lovers. He died in 2010 aged 85.