English playwright Terence Rattigan was BOTD in 1911. Born in London to a wealthy upper-middle-class family, he was educated at Eton College and studied at Oxford University, before becoming a playwright. His debut play French Without Tears, written when he was 25, was produced in the West End in 1936, establishing him as London’s hottest young playwright. His next work After the Dance, a tragicomedy about the dissolute world of Bright Young Things, was a commercial flop, closing after 60 performances. During World War Two, he served in the Royal Air Force, an experience that inspired his play Flare Path, a melodrama about bomber pilots and their loyal wives. Produced in London in 1942, its patriotism and stiff-upper-lip sentiment caught the mood of wartime Britain, and it became a hit. He became one of the most celebrated dramatists of the post-war period, becoming a key proponent of the “well-made play”, typically featuring anguished middle-class characters smoking in drawing rooms. His 1946 play The Winslow Boy, loosely based on a real-life case of a father who fights to have his son acquitted from a charge of theft, became a West End hit, transferring to Broadway and filmed successfully in 1948 by Anthony Asquith. He repeated his success with 1948’s The Browning Version, a portrait of a schoolmaster struggling with career failure and his wife’s adultery. After successful runs in the West End and on Broadway, it was filmed in 1951 starring Michael Redgrave, winning awards for Rattigan and Redgrave at the Cannes Festival. Gay and closeted, he ventriloquised his own anguish into narratives about women struggling with repressive sexual codes. His 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea, a (for the time) radical portrait of a married woman leaving her husband for am RAF pilot and attempting suicide, was inspired by the suicide of Rattigan’s lover Kenny Morgan. Filmed in 1955 starring Vivien Leigh, its proto-feminist themes pre-dated the women’s movement by a decade, and has become his most frequently-revived work. His interest in tortured relationships continued in Separate Tables, two one-act plays portraying unhappily married couples staying at a seaside hotel. Rattigan’s work fell out of favour in the 1960s with the rise of kitchen-sink realist drama, though he valiantly supported new writers, becoming a friend and patron of the more openly gay playwright Joe Orton. His final play, Cause Célèbre, a legal procedural about a woman accused of murdering her husband, was coolly received by 1970s audiences, spelling an end to his professional career. Rattigan never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, having discreet affairs with Michael Franklin and Henry “Chips” Channon. He died in 1977 aged 66.