English filmmaker Terence Davies was BOTD in 1945. Born in Liverpool, the youngest of ten children in a working-class family, his childhood was terrorised by his abusive alcoholic father, and later by schoolyard bullying for being gay. After a decade working as a shipping clerk, he went to Coventry Drama School, writing and directing his first short film Children in 1976. He attended the National Film School, completing two further short films, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration, forming a loose autobiographical trilogy. His 1988 feature film Distant Voices, Still Lives, a slow-burning poetic rendering of his childhood and turbulent family life, was one of the most critically praised films of the 1980s, even earning praise from the notoriously anti-British filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. His sequel film The Long Day Closes premiered at the Cannes Festival in 1992. He transitioned to literary adaptations about women in crisis, including The Neon Bible, a portrait of the Depression-era American South, based on John Kennedy Toole’s novel; a celebrated adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth starring Gillian Anderson; The Deep Blue Sea, based on Terence Rattigan’s play; and Sunset Song, an historical drama set in World War One-era Scotland. His 2008 documentary Of Time and the City, a love letter to Liverpool, premiered to great success at the Cannes Festival, showcasing his well-documented contempt for modern life. His final film Benediction, a biopic of gay war poet Siegfried Sassoon, was his most explicitly queer film to date, chronicling Sassoon’s romantic crush on Wilfred Owen, his treatment by psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, unhappy affairs with Stephen Tennant and Ivor Novello, and celebrity friends Edith Sitwell, Rupert Brooke, Robbie Ross and T. E. Lawrence. Openly and miserably gay forever, Davies claimed repeatedly in interviews that being gay had ruined his life and that he had been celibate since 1981. He died in 2023, aged 77.