Quentin Crisp

Was portrayed to great acclaim by Leon Acord in the 2002 San Francisco stage comedy "Carved in Stone," written by Jeffrey Hartgraves, performed at the Eureka Theatre.

He was chosen by Channel Four to deliver the first "Alternative Christmas Speech", a counterpoint to the Queen's Christmas speech, in 1993. The Alternative Christmas Speech has been delivered every year since, by among others, cartoon character Marge Simpson.

Thomas Massengale, director of the indie production Topsy and Bunker: The Cat Killers (1992), said that Crisp - who played the doorman at a fleabag hotel in a rundown New York City neighborhood quite like his own Bowery neighborhood - was delightful to work with.

Crisp was the role model (and appears in the music video) for Sting's 1988 single "Englishman in New York", which includes the lyric "be yourself no matter what they say". Sting described Crisp in an interview as "one of the most courageous men I've ever met". He and Sting worked together in The Bride (1985). John Hurt portrays Crisp in An Englishman in New York (2009), a biographical movie about his life.

A dramatization of The Naked Civil Servant (1975), starring John Hurt, was shown on American television to critical praise in 1976. Crisp moved to New York the following year, a move he described as his proudest achievement.

Quentin Crisp was born Denis Pratt on Christmas Day, 1908, in the London suburb of Sutton. He the youngest of four children; his father was lawyer, mother former nursery governess. In his autobiographical work, "The Naked Civil Servant", he describes a difficult childhood in a rigorously homophobic society. In his early twenties he decided to devote his life to "making the existence of homosexuality abundantly clear to the world's aborigines". He cross-dressed and acted intensely effeminate in public, often at great risk to himself. In London he worked as a prostitute, book illustrator and finally - the source of the title of his autobiography - as a paid nude model as government-supported art schools.