American writer, raconteur and socialite Fran Lebowitz was BOTD in 1950. Born in Morristown, New Jersey to a middle-class Jewish family, she moved to New York City in 1979 after being expelled from various schools, supporting herself as a cleaner, taxi driver and by writing pornography. Hired by Andy Warhol as a columnist for Interview magazine, she attracted praise for her film review column The Best of the Worst, in which she reviewed B-movies with titles including . She later became a columnist for Mademoiselle, writing a satirical column about New York cultural life, earning comparisons with Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker for her pithy aphorisms. She published her first essay collection, Metropolitan Life, in 1978, followed by 1981’s Social Studies, drawing on her friendships with Warhol, Candy Darling, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Jerome Robbins and Martin Scorsese. Both books became bestsellers, leading to a publishing contract and a generous advance to write a novel. After a decade of what Lebowitz called “severe writer’s block”, the book was never published. She continued writing articles for Vanity Fair and other magazines, and published the children’s book Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet Two Pandas in 1994. Excerpts from a new novel, Progress, were published in Vanity Fair in 2004, but has yet to be completed or published. In later life, she became well known as a public speaker and raconteur, making frequent appearances on late-night talk shows and touring with live stage shows, discussing her life in 1970s New York City and the devastation of the HIV/AIDS crisis on the city’s cultural life (famously arguing that “AIDS killed all the interesting people“). In the 2010s, she had a recurring role as a cantankerous judge in TV drama series Law and Order. She experienced a resurgence in popularity in 2021, after appearing in Scorsese’s documentary Pretend It’s a City and his film The Wolf of Wall Street. Known for her bespoke Savile Row suit jackets, heavy smoking and refusal to use computers or cellphones, she is famously dismissive of contemporary culture, once stating that Madonna‘s albums “should come with a nutritional warning label that reads ‘Talent Free’”. She continues to live in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City, claiming that her only monogamous relationship is with her vintage car.