English screenwriter, novelist and biographer Gavin Lambert was BOTD in 1924. Born in East Grinstead, Sussex, he was educated at private schools and attended Oxford University, leaving after his tutor C. S. Lewis insisted he learn medieval English. He began writing scripts for cinema commercials and co-founded the film periodical Sequence with his school friend Lindsay Anderson. In 1950, he became the editor of the influential film magazine Sight and Sound, recruiting Anderson and British New Wave filmmakers Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson as contributors. An old-school misogynist, he was famously dismissive of female Sight and Sound writer Penelope Houston, later attempting to excise her from a history of the magazine. After having a brief affair with filmmaker Nicholas Ray, he moved with Ray to Hollywood in 1955, working on Ray’s films The True Story of Jesse James and Bigger Than Life and earning his first Hollywood screenwriter credit on 1957’s Bitter Victory. Via Ray, he befriended many of Hollywood’s key figures, including George Cukor, Leslie Caron, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood and David Hockney. He also became close friends with writer Paul Bowles, visiting him in Tangier for the next 25 years. He became famous in his own right with his 1959 short story collection The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life, a witty and cynical portrait of the film industry, and for co-writing the screenplay for a 1960 adaptation of D. H. Lawrence‘s Sons and Lovers, earning him an Oscar nomination. The following year, Williams invited him to adapt his play The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, filmed in 1961 starring Vivian Leigh, Warren Beatty, Coral Browne and Ernest Thesiger. His 1963 novel Inside Daisy Clover, a tragedy about an aspiring actress who falls in love with a closeted gay movie star, was also a success, which he adapted for a 1965 film starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. His other screenplays included the 1977 film I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, earning a second Oscar nomination; the TV film Second Serve, a biopic about transgender tennis star Renée Richards; and the documentary Liberace: Behind the Music, released shortly after the singer’s AIDS-related death. Later in life, he wrote a history of the making of the film Gone With the Wind, and biographies about Cukor, Alla Nazimova, Norma Shearer and Wood. In his 2000 memoir Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, he wrote about his friendship with the closeted Anderson, contrasted with his own liberated homosexuality and youthful promiscuity. Lambert was in a long term relationship with playwright-screenwriter Mart Crowley, with whom he lived in Hollywood. He died in 2005, aged 80.