French writer, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau was BOTD in 1889. Born in Paris to a prominent bourgeois family, he published his first poetry collection in 1919, and became a leading exponent of French Modernism and the avant-garde. His novels and poetry were highly influenced by his addiction to opiates: his 1929 novella Les Enfants Terribles, describing siblings in an incestuous relationship, was written during a week as he detoxed from opium. His prolific output also included the scenario for the ballet Parade, commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballet Russes; the plays La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice) and La bel indifferent (the latter written for his friend Édith Piaf); and the libretto for Igor Stravinsky’s opera Oedipus rex. Later in life he concentrated on filmmaking, notably the surrealist fantasies Orphée (Orpheus) and La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) starring his long-term partner Jean Marais. One of the central figures of French artistic and intellectual life, he befriended and collaborated with nearly every notable writer, artist and musician of the early and mid-20th century, notably writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, Rainer Maria Rilke, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, composers Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel, painters Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Francis Cyril Rose, fashion designers Coco Chanel and Pierre Cardin, curator Monroe Wheeler, photographers George Platt Lynes, Berenice Abbott and Man Ray, dancers Vaslav Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan, society hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Jeanne Moreau and journalist Janet Flanner. In 1943, he arranged for the publication of Jean Genet‘s first novel Our Lady of the Flowers and campaigned for Genet’s release from prison. As well as Marais, Cocteau also had relationships with writers Raymond Radiguet and Jean Desbordes, the artist Marcel Khill, the Panamanian boxer Al Brown, drag performer Barbette and actor Édouard Dermit (whom he legally adopted in later life). After converting to Roman Catholicism in later life, he designed murals for a number of churches in France and England. He died in 1963, aged 74, just after recording a radio tribute to Piaf, who had died the previous day.