American playwright and screenwriter John Logan was BOTD in 1961. Born in Chicago, Illinois to Irish immigrant parents, he was raised in New Jersey and studied at Northwestern University. His 1985 debut play, Never the Sinner, was based on real-life lovers and murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, followed by 1991’s Hauptmann, a dram about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and Riverview, a musical set in a Chicago amusement park. After writing the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s 1999 sports film Any Given Sunday, he went on to an illustrious Hollywood career, earning an Oscar nomination in 2001 for his screenplay for Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals epic Gladiator. His other film screenplays include The Last Samurai, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Ralph Fiennes’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus, and the Martin Scorsese films The Aviator and Hugo, earning him two further Oscar nominations. His 2009 play Red, a portrait of the painter Mark Rothko, was first produced in London, transferring to Broadway in 2010, where it won six Tony Awards, including best play for Logan. He later worked on the James Bond films Skyfall and Spectre, both directed by Sam Mendes. Returning to the theatre in 2013, he had a well-publicised flop with the play Peter and Alice, imagining a meeting between the real-life inspirations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. He had better success later that year with I’ll Eat You Last, a comic portrait of Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, premiering on Broadway starring Bette Midler, and writing and producing the historical TV drama series Penny Dreadful. He made his directorial debut with the 2022 horror film They/Them. His most recent play, Double Feature, premiered in London in 2024. Openly gay since forever, Logan lives in Malibu with his long-term partner Marty Madden.