American actress and singer Judy Holliday was BOTD in 1921. Born Judith Tuvim in New York City to a middle-class Jewish family, her parents were prominently involved in Socialist and left-wing politics. After completing high school, she worked briefly as a switchboard operator for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre ensemble. In 1939, she formed comedy sketch troupe The Revuers with friends Betty Comden and Adolph Green, performing at cafés and cabarets around New York, and later in Los Angeles and on radio. Composer Leonard Bernstein occasionally provided piano accompaniment for their performances, and briefly considered marrying Holliday as a cover for his homosexuality. Holliday’s warm, witty persona and vocal chops led to a Hollywood studio contract, and she made her film debut in the 1944 Carmen Miranda musical Greenwich Village. She became a Broadway star in the 1946 comedy Born Yesterday, playing a showgirl who gets a political education and outsmarts a crooked tycoon. Despite rave reviews, she was deemed not famous enough for the film version. Her friend (and possible lover) Katharine Hepburn helped raise her Hollywood profile by offering her a key supporting role in comedy the 1949 comedy Adam’s Rib. The move persuaded Columbia Pictures to cast her in Born Yesterday, which became a critical and commercial hit, winning her an Oscar. She formed a memorable comic partnership with the then-unknown Jack Lemmon in the comedies It Should Happen to You and Phffft!. Returning in Broadway in 1956, she won a Tony Award for Bells Are Ringing, starring in the 1960 film. Holliday’s screen persona as a ditzy blonde proved useful when she was ordered to testify before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on internal security in 1952. Refusing to identify her friends and coworkers as Communist sympathisers, she “played dumb” before the Committee, and survived the experience with her career and morality intact. Holliday married musician and TV producer Robert Oppenheim in 1948 (reputedly at Bernstein’s suggestion, to conceal Oppenheim’s homosexuality). They had a son together, before divorcing in 1957. She then had a relationship with jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, remaining together until her death in 1965 aged 43.