American actor Montgomery Clift was BOTD in 1920. Born in Omaha, Nebraska to a wealthy middle-class family, he spent much of his childhood in Europe, until his family’s fortunes were lost in the Great Depression. He made his Broadway theatre debut aged 14 and became a celebrated stage actor, appearing in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Lillian Hellman’s The Searching Wind. His sultry good looks and talent brought him to Hollywood, making his screen debut in Howard Hawks’ 1948 Western Red River, involving an amusingly homoerotic scene where he and John Ireland play with each other’s guns. He went on to star as the feckless lover in The Heiress, a successful adaptation of Henry James‘ novella Washington Square, and earned Oscar nominations for the family melodrama A Place in the Sun, co-starring Elizabeth Taylor, and the gritty war film From Here to Eternity. Admired for his introspective and vulnerable on-screen persona, his career as a leading man ended brutally in 1956, when he suffered serious injuries in a car accident, requiring facial plastic surgery and resulting in his addiction to alcohol and painkillers. Supported by Taylor, he appeared with her in the 1959 film of Tennessee Williams‘ play Suddenly Last Summer, and earned an Oscar nomination for his brief but powerful performance as a handicapped man in Judgment at Nuremberg. As his addictions worsened, his behaviour became increasingly unreliable and he was fired from several projects. After working with Marilyn Monroe in 1961’s The Misfits, Monroe commented that he was “the only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am”. Unhappily gay, closeted and with an endowment earning him the nickname Princess TinyMeat, he nonetheless clocked up affairs with Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Donald Windham, Farley Granger, Jerome Robbins, Roddy McDowell, Jack Larson and Truman Capote, and had a three-year relationship with actor William LeMassena. He died of a heart attack in 1966, aged 45. Along with Brando and Anne Bancroft, he is credited with popularising Method Acting and influencing a shift towards naturalistic acting in Hollywood cinema. He has been portrayed onscreen by Jeffrey Combs in Norma Jean & Marilyn, William McNamara in The Elizabeth Taylor Story, Dave Franco in Zeroville and Gavin Adams in 2020’s As Long As I’m Famous, which speculates on a romance between Clift and director Sidney Lumet.