American actress, singer and comedian Sandra Bernhard was BOTD in 1955. Born in Flint, Michigan to a middle-class Jewish family, she was raised in Arizona. After completing high school, she moved to New York, becoming a fixture in the city’s stand-up comedy scene. She made her professional debut in 1977 as a regular player on the The Richard Pryor Show, making a splash with her unfiltered appearances on late-night TV talk shows. In 1981, she appeared in Martin Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy, and made regular appearances on Late Night with David Letterman. She performed a series of one-woman shows throughout the 1980s, which were released as albums, earning a Grammy nomination for the recording of her 1988 show Without You, I’m Nothing, With You, I’m Not Much Better. She became a household name for her highly-publicised relationship with Madonna, appearing in the 1991 documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare. (In later years, she repudiated their friendship, inferring that Madonna had exploited her to gain lesbian chic). She had a recurring role in seven seasons of TV sitcom Roseanne, playing one of the first openly bisexual characters on television. An impassioned liberal, she made headlines for televised take-downs of conservative politicians John Lofton and Sarah Palin, and an unfortunately racist critique of Mariah Carey. In recent years, she portrayed nurses in Ryan Murphy‘s AIDS-themed TV series Pose, and in cult drama Severance, and released a series of albums covering jazz and blues classics. She has been in a relationship with her partner Sara Switzer since 2000, with whom she has a daughter.