American playwright Wendy Wasserstein was BOTD in 1950. Born in Brooklyn, New York City to Polish Jewish immigrants, she studied at Mount Holyoak Colleage, before studying playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. Her graduate thesis project at Yale, Uncommon Women and Others was produced Off-Broadway in 1977 starring then then-unknown Glenn Close, and was later filmed for television starring an unknown actress named Meryl Streep. She is best known for her 1989 play The Heidi Chronicles, an epic covering 20 years in the life of an idealistic art historian, her gay best friend and on-again off-again boyfriend. Hailed as an instant feminist classic, the play won Wasserstein the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Her other plays include the Tony-winning The Sisters Rosensweig, An American Daughter and Third. She wrote the screenplay for the 1998 film The Object of My Affection, based on Stephen MacCauley‘s novel about a gay man and a straight woman who raise a child together. In 1999, aged 48, she gave birth to a daughter, mirroring her character Heidi who raises a child on her own. She died of cancer in 2005 aged 55.