English actress and singer Gertrude Lawrence was BOTD in 1898. Born in London to a theatrical family, she began acting in pantomimes as a child. By her teens, she was appearing in West End revues, where she met and befriended actor-director Noël Coward. They appeared together in Coward’s 1923 musical London Calling!, launching a long and successful professional partnership. She transferred with the show to Broadway, and stayed to appear in Ira & George Gershwin‘s musical Oh Kay! In 1930, she co-starred with Coward in Private Lives, a witty and sophisticated comedy about a divorced couple who honeymoon with their new spouses at the same hotel. A West End and Broadway success, it established Lawrence as the leading comic actress of her generation. She had another triumph in 1941 in the Moss Hart-Kurt Weill musical Lady in the Dark. During World War Two, she undertook extensive tours performing for Allied troops in France and the South Pacific. She made her screen debut in the 1929 film The Battle of Paris, featuring songs by Cole Porter. Her charismatic stage presence failed to translate to screen, and she was critically savaged for her performance in the 1950 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. She made a major comeback in the 1951 Broadway production of the Rogers & Hammerstein musical The King and I, winning a Tony Award and bagging a discreet affair with her co-star Yul Brynner. Lawrence was married to director Francis Gordon-Howley, with whom she had a daughter, and later to Broadway producer Richard Aldrich, remaining together until her death. She had an intense (and probably sexual) relationship with the English writer Daphne du Maurier, who wrote the play September Tide for her. Lawrence died midway through the Broadway run of The King and I in 1952, aged 54. She was played by Julie Andrews in the 1968 film Star! and by Janet McTeer as a ravenous lesbian in the 2007 du Maurier TV biopic Daphne.