GILLES DE RAIS [also spelled Retz] was born on this date (d: 1440); A French noble, soldier and one-time brother-in-arms of Joan of Arc accused and ultimately convicted of torturing, raping and murdering dozens, if not hundreds, of young children, mainly boys. Along with Erzsébet Báthory, another sadistic aristocrat acting more than a century later, he is considered by some historians to be a precursor of the modern serial killer.

If one is to believe his confession, and there is good reason not to, de Rais had run through his fortune and was convinced that sacrificing young boys to Satan would restore his riches. Somewhere along the way he decided that sodomizing his victims before killing them would satisfy his needs along with the Devil’s, and so more and more boys disappeared in his castle, never to be seen again. When Gilles was arrested on charges of blasphemy, the grisly murders were uncovered. He confessed to having killed some 150 boys, “for the pleasure and gratification of my senses.” Having been an ally of Joan of Arc, there is good reason to suspect that the murders were the invention of the Catholic Church, which seems to have its own obsession with boys

PRINCE BOJIDAR KARAGEORGEVITCH was born today (d: 1908) and was a member of the Serbian House of Karageorgevitch. He was the second son of Prince George Karageorgevich and his wife Sarka Anastasijević. Prince Bojidar lived in France for most of his life as the members of the Karageorgevitch dynasty were in exile after Prince Alexander lost the Serbian throne in 1858. Bojidar went on a number of trips around the world. He served in the French army and fought in the French campaign at Tonking and was decorated with the Cross of the Legion d’Honeur. To earn a living he gave singing and drawing lessons before becoming a translator and journalist.

During one of his trips abroad, he traveled extensively around India, visiting thirty eight cities. He wrote a book about his experiences called Enchanted India in which he offered an account of the Indian people their religious rites and other ceremonies. He also provided detailed descriptions of the Indian landscape and buildings.

He was drawn to the cabarets of Montmartre, the haunt of artists, writers, poets, philosophers. His lover was painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, fourteen years his junior, but who predeceased him when Prince Karageorgevitch was only 22 years old.

It was in Montmartre he met and befriended French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt (the 19^thcentury version of being “a close friend of Elizabeth Taylor” or “marrying Liza Minelli”), pioneer of modern dance Loie Fuller, Austrian composer Hugo Wolf, painter and illustrator Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Sergei Diaghelev of the Ballets Russes and novelist Pierre Loti. In his later years Bojidar worked in a sculptor studio and often spent time with Georges Lacombe, Emile Bernard, Paul Serusier and other members of Les Nabis. He died in Versailles.

REMY CHARLIP  was born on this day (d: 2012); Charlip was an American artist, writer, choreographer, theatre director, designer and teacher.

In the 1960s Charlip created a unique form of choreography, which he calls "air mail dances". He sends a set of drawings to a dance company, and the dancers order the positions and create transitions and context. He performed with John Cage, and was a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for which he also designed sets and costumes. He directed plays for the Judson Poet’s Theater, co-founded the Paper Bag Players and served as head of the Children's Theater and Literature Department at Sarah Lawrence College.

He won two Village Voice Obie Awards, three NY Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year citations, and was awarded a six-month residency in Kyoto from the Japan/U.S. Commission on the Arts. He has written and/or illustrated 29 children's books and lived in San Francisco. Remy Charlip was the model for illustrations of George Melies in the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written and illustrated by Brian Selznick

SAL MINEO, American actor was born (d. 1976); A Golden Globe winning American movie and stage actor, best known for his Academy Award-nominated performance opposite James Dean in the film Rebel Without a Cause.

Mineo was born in The Bronx, New York City as the son of a Sicilian coffin maker, was enrolled by his mother in dancing and acting school at an early age. One of the articles of faith of the James Dean cult that grew out of the actor’s early death in 1955 is that Mineo “turned queer” after the auto wreck that took his co-star’s life. As the story goes, young Sal left a séance in which he had attempted in vain to contact his fallen friend, only to wreck his own car. His life was spared, but the words “James Dean” suddenly appeared indelibly on his smashed windshield. Supposedly he was Gay from that moment on. Whatever.

The Hollywood Code of the ‘50s may have dictated that Dean win Natalie Wood and her pointed uplift bra at the end of Rebel Without A Cause, but anyone with half a brain knew that it should have been Mineo’s Plato and Dean’s Jim who embraced at the climax. Sal Mineo grew up to produce the revival of Fortune and Men’s Eyes and to star in a West Coast production of James Kirkwood’s P.S. Your Cat is Dead, both of which enabled him to say without a word “I’m Gay. So what?”

Rumors that he spent his off hours in the company of rough trade have led to lurid speculation about his grisly murder in 1976. Such is Hollywood fame and popular legend that no one wants to believe that, like so many innocent Americans these days, he was “merely” mugged, robbed, and left to die just a few short steps from the safety of his own home.

The Canadian female impersonator and actor CRAIG RUSSELL was born on this date in Port Perry, Ontario. Russell was personal secretary to movie star Mae West. His impersonations included Carol Channing, Bette Davis, Mae West, Barbra Streisand, Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Midler, Anita Bryant, Peggy Lee and Judy Garland. While performing, he always spoke and sang in the voices of the celebrities he was impersonating.

In 1977, Russell starred in the film Outrageous!, based on a short story written by Gibson about their time as roommates. A decade later, in 1987, he starred in the sequel to Outrageous!, appropriately titled Too Outrageous!

The French painter and engraver CHARLES FILIGER,  died on this date (b. 1863). Friend of Gauguin, they took as their method Gauguin's use of flat color, and at times seem to venture further into the area of decorative abstraction than their master. But neither painter managed to incorporate the philosophical content that was the basis of much of Gauguin's art. Where he succeeded in capturing some of the intensity of the religious feeling native to that part of France, they could only show the colourful patterns of Breton life.

Filiger, on the other hand, was more successful in portraying the piety of the peasants. Intensely religious himself, suffering from guilt about his homosexuality, he found it far easier than his more sophisticated friends.

But where they lacked Gauguin's psychological insight, Filiger lacked his aesthetic boldness. Rather than invent a new method of painting, Filiger preferred to refurbish the old ones. In this he bears some similarity to the Pre-Raphaelites, in that he also returned to pre-Renaissance sources for inspiration, in his case to Giotto and the Sienese.

He studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi. He settled in Brittany in 1889, where he was associated with Gauguin and his circle at Pont-Aven, but he remained a mystic and a recluse. The Breton setting, with its stark landscape and devout peasant inhabitants, provided fertile ground for the development of Filiger’s mystical imagery and deliberate archaisms. Filiger’s friend, the painter Emile Bernard, characterized Filiger’s style as an amalgam of Byzantine and Breton popular art forms.

The hieratic, geometric quality and the expressionless faces in his gouaches of sacred subjects such as Virgin and Child reveal Filiger’s love of early Italian painting and the Byzantine tradition. Evident too in the heavy outlines and flat colors of his work are the cloisonnism of the Pont-Aven school and the influence of Breton and Epinal popular prints. Filiger’s landscapes, such as Breton Shore, share with Gauguin’s paintings an abstract, decorative quality and rigorous simplification.

The American comedian and actor and raging angry queen, PAUL LYNDE died on this date.