South African-born British actor and playwright Antony Sher was BOTD in 1949. Born in Cape Town to a middle-class Jewish family, he grew up in an affluent, whites-only suburb. He moved to London in 1968, studying at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. He began his professional career at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, alongside playwright Willy Russell and actors Julie Walters and Jonathan Pryce, and also performed with fringe theatre group Gay Sweatshop. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982, playing the lead in Molière‘s Tartuffe, and won a Laurence Olivier Award in 1984 for his witty, physically demanding lead performance in Shakespeare‘s Richard III. He became one the most celebrated Shakespearean actors of his generation, playing lead roles in Tamburlaine, Othello, Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice and undertaking extensive international tours. He won a second Olivier Award for playing painter Stanley Spencer in the 1997 play Stanley, and was knighted in 2000. Though primarily a stage actor, he had comic cameos in an eclectic array of films, including Superman II, Eric the Viking, Mrs Brown and Shakespeare in Love. He also wrote and starred in two plays, including Primo, a monologue based on the memoirs of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, which was later filmed. Later in life, he played lead roles in King Lear, Henry IV and Death of a Salesman to great acclaim. Sher was in a long-term relationship with director Greg Doran. In 2005, they became one of the first same-sex couples in the UK to have a civil partnership, upgrading to marriage in 2015. Sher died in 2021, aged 72.