American actor Hurd Hatfield was BOTD in 1917. Born William Rukard Hurd Hatfield in New York City to a prominent middle-class family, he studied at Columbia University, later moving to England to study drama, where he had an affair with acting classmate Yul Brynner. He made his screen debut in the 1944 Hollywood film Dragon Seed, playing a Chinese immigrant in yellowface alongside Katharine Hepburn. He became a star playing the title role in the 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, playing a decadent aristocrat living a secret double life of murder and sexual debauchery. (He later expressed ambivalence about the film, which he described as “too odd, too avant-garde, too ahead of its time”, blaming the stagnation of his film career on playing a decadent bisexual villain). His other films included Jean Renoir’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, Michael Curtiz’s film noir The Unexpected, and a small role in Victor Fleming’s 1948 biopic Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman. As his Hollywood career faltered, he returned to the theatre, making occasional appearances throughout the 1960s in historical epics El Cid and King of Kings. In 1968, he played a gay murder suspect in Richard Fleischer’s true crime drama The Boston Strangler, highlighting the era’s suspicion and profiling of gay men as potential criminals. Largely retired by the 1970s, he purchased Ballinterry House in rural Ireland, collecting art and antiques, appearing in Murder, She Wrote in the 1980s with his Dorian Gray co-star Angela Lansbury. Discreetly gay, little is known of his personal life or relationships. He died in 1998, aged 81.