American filmmaker Lee Daniels was BOTD in 1959. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he had an unhappy, suffering physical and psychological abuse by his policeman father for being gay. When he was 15, his father was killed during a robbery. He attended Lindenwood College in Missouri, before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry. After working for a casting director, he became a manager for actors including Morgan Freeman and Wes Bentley. In 2001, he created his own production company, Lee Daniels Entertainment. His first self-produced project, Monster’s Ball, a torrid drama about an interracial relationship between a white prison guard and the Black wife of a Death Row prisoner, was a surprise success, winning an Oscar for its star Halle Berry. He also produced The Woodsman, starring Kevin Bacon as a pedophile attempting to reconstruct his life after a long prison sentence, and the poorly reviewed interracial love story Shadowboxer. Daniels rose to wider international attention as the producer and director of the 2009 drama Precious, based on the novel by Sapphire about a young Black woman struggling with poverty, illiteracy and physical and sexual abuse. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize and the Audience Award, the film was heavily promoted by Oprah Winfrey, and nominated for six Oscars including best picture, winning for Mo’Nique‘s performance as Precious’s abusive mother and for Geoffrey Fletcher’s adapted screenplay. Though a box office success, the film was widely criticised for its crude racial stereotyping and accused of being “poverty porn”. After suffering a heart attack, Daniels returned to directing with The Paperboy, a pulpy comic drama in which Nicole Kidman urinated on Zac Efron. His 2013 film, the pretentiously-titled Lee Daniels’ The Butler, was inspired by the life of Eugene Allen, an African-American man who worked at the White House for 30 years. He shifted focus to television, co-creating the series Empire, set in the world of hip-hop music, making a star of Taraji P. Henson, and spawning the spin-off series Star. He returned to cinema in 2021 with The United States vs Billie Holiday, focusing on Holiday’s civil rights activism and persecution by the American government, earning an Oscar nomination for its star Audra Day. His horror film Deliverance, starring Mo’Nique, was released in 2024. Openly gay since forever, Daniels was in a long-term relationship with casting director Billy Hopkins, with whom he co-adopted Daniels’ niece and nephew. Daniels has been in a relationship with hair stylist Jalil Fisher since 2010.