American playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents was BOTD in 1917. Born Arthur Levine in New York City to a middle-class Jewish family, he studied at Cornell University. He began his career writing radio plays, and joined the US Army during World War Two, making training films with director George Cukor. His first stage play was produced on Broadway in 1945, leading to a screenwriting contract in Hollywood. He made a splash with his screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1949 thriller Rope, starring Farley Granger and John Dall as murderous lovers, loosely based on real-life killers Leopold and Loeb. In the 1950s, he wrote the screenplays for Anastasia and Bonjour Tristesse, until being blacklisted during the McCarthyist anti-Communist purges. Returning to Broadway, he found major success as a co-writer of the 1957 musical West Side Story, created by Jerome Robbins with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. A box office juggernaut, it was successfully filmed in 1961, winning ten Oscars including Best Picture. He and Sondheim collaborated again on the 1959 musical Gypsy, a dark musical fable based on the memoirs of striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. Written for Ethel Merman, it was another critical and commercial triumph, and filmed rather less successfully with Rosalind Russell. In 1962, he directed the then-unknown Barbra Streisand in her Broadway debut I Can Get It For You Wholesale, and won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 1967 for Hallelujah, Baby! He drew on his Hollywood and blacklisting experiences in his screenplay for The Way We Were, a critically derided but phenomenally popular 1973 romantic drama film starring Streisand and Robert Redford, and won plaudits for his ballet drama The Turning Point. In 1983, he won a Tony Award for directing the 1983 Broadway premiere of La Cage aux Folles. Continuing to work into his 80s, he directed Patti LuPone in a celebrated 2008 Broadway revival of Gypsy, and staged a bi-lingual revival of West Side Story in 2009. In his 2000 memoirs, he discussed his affair with Granger during the making of Rope, and his long-term relationship with Tom Hatcher. Laurents died in 2011, aged 93.