English theatre director and filmmaker James Whale was BOTD in 1889. Born in Dudley, Worchestershire to a working-class family, he left school as a teenager and worked as a cobbler, before enlisting in the Army during World War One. Imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, he began directing and acting in theatre productions to entertain his fellow prisoners. After the war, he moved to London, and began working as a theatrical set designer, eventually graduating to directing. In 1928, he scored a huge success with a West End production of R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End, a brutal and unsentimental portrayal of trench warfare. Initially considered too unpatriotic to be a success, in Whale’s hands the play became a box-office smash, launching the careers of its stars Colin Clive and Laurence Olivier. Following a successful Broadway transfer, Whale was lured to Hollywood by Howard Hughes to direct the 1930 film version. He then worked as director of dialogue on Hughes’ war film Hell’s Angels, starring Jean Harlow. He ascended to Hollywood’s A-list as the director of 1931’s Frankenstein, a German Expressionist-inspired adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, starring as Clive Dr Frankenstein and the then-unknown Boris Karloff as the green-skinned square-headed Monster. It became a box-office juggernaut, reinvigorating the horror film genre and making Karloff a star. Its success led to the 1935 sequel Bride of Frankenstein, again starring Karloff and Clive, paired with Elsa Lanchester as the Monster Bride and Ernest Thesiger as the queer-coded Dr Pretorius. Whale had further success with The Invisible Man, based on H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel, overseeing the film’s impressive special effects to make its star Claude Rains appear invisible beneath mummy-like bandages. His 1936 adaptation of the Hammerstein-Kern musical Show Boat was a major box-office success, demonstrating his ability to appeal to a wider audience. After the surprise failure of the 1937 film The Road Back, he had his last success with the 1939 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas pére‘s The Man in the Iron Mask. Dissatisfied with the film scripts he was offered, he made an Army training film during World War Two, before retiring from directing. Openly gay for most of his career, he had a 20-year relationship with David Lewis, whom he met in 1932, mentoring Lewis’ eventual career as a film producer. They separarted in 1952 after Whale moved in his new lover, a 25 year-old bartender Pierre Foegel, though remained lifelong friends. After suffering a series of strokes, Whale drowned himself in his swimming pool in 1957, aged 67. Now considered one of the greatest filmmakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Whale’s iconic images of Karloff and Lanchester have been endlessly imitated, notably in Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy Young Frankenstein. Film scholars have reassessed Whale’s career in light of his sexuality, particularly the homoerotic subtext of Bride of Frankenstein, and the Monster as an avatar for the persecution of gay men. He was played by Ian McKellen in Bill Condon‘s 1998 film Gods and Monsters, a speculative biopic based on Christopher Bram‘s novel about Whale’s final days.