English actor Derek Jacobi was BOTD in 1938. Born in Essex, he developed an early interest in acting, starred in an Edinburgh Fringe Festival production of Shakespeare‘s Hamlet in his teens. He won a scholarship to study at Cambridge University, where he appeared in campus theatre group Footlights alongside Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn. Invited by Laurence Olivier to join the newly-formed Royal National Theatre, he became a mainstay of Shakespearean drama, playing opposite Olivier, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, Richard Burton and Judi Dench for over a decade. He became an international star as the stammering Emperor Claudius in the 1976 TV series I, Claudius, based on Robert Graves‘ novel series. He moved fluidly between theatre, film and television in the 1980s and 1990s, appearing in Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Henry V and Hamlet, with amusing cameo appearances in the TV series Doctor Who and Frasier. Openly gay since forever, he memorably played gay codebreaker Alan Turing in the play Breaking the Code and the artist Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s celebrated 1998 biopic Love Is the Devil. In 2013, he reunited with McKellen to play an elderly gay couple in Mark Ravenhill and Gary Janetti’s TV sitcom Vicious, angering many gay viewers with its perceived stereotyping of gay men as bitchy queens. In 2020, he appeared as the elderly Duke of Windsor in the TV drama The Crown. He has been in a relationship with director Richard Clifford since 1979, whom he civilly partnered in 2006.