11 May: Salvador Dali

The artist Salvador Dali was born on this date in 1904. Some things you may not know:

1. He believed he was the reincarnation of his older brother, also called Salvador, who died nine months before Dali was born.
2. Although primarily known as an artist, he was also a film maker - he wrote the script for the 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), directed by Luis Buñuel. He is responsible for the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound; and even contributed to a Disney film, a short film called Destino.
3. He was nearly an actor - in a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune in the 1970s. Director Alejandro Jodorowsky cast Dali in the role of the Padishah Emperor. Dali said he would only do it if he was made the highest paid actor in Hollywood. Jodorowsky agreed, planning to cut Dali's screen time to the bare minimum, so he could say that he was being paid more per minute than anybody else. The film was never made.
4. His marriage was unconventional to say the least. His wife's name was Gala, she was ten years older than him and when he met her, she was already married to someone else. Her first husband, French poet Paul Eluard, was a witness at her wedding to Dali. Dali's father disapproved of the match to the extent that he disinherited his son. Gala had lots of affairs well into her 80s. Dali tolerated this - he even bought her a castle in Púbol, where she would entertain her lovers. They agreed that Dali was not allowed to go there unless she sent him a written invitation. Nevertheless, they remained married until she died.
5. Dali had a pet ocelot called Babou. He took Babou everywhere with him on a leash, including restaurants. When a fellow diner expressed alarm, Dali told her that Babou was an ordinary cat that he had painted over in an op art design.
6. He was renowned for being a bit of a miser. He was nicknamed “Avida Dollars,” which is an anagram of his name and a reference to his love of making money. He had a crafty trick for avoiding paying the bill in restaurants. He would appear eager enough, writing a cheque with a flourish for the full amount, but then, as the waiter watched, he would doodle on the back of the cheque, assuming, usually rightly, that the restaurant would not cash a cheque with an original Dali drawing on it.
7. Dali was interested in science. It is thought that the melting watches in his painting The Persistence of Memory were symbolising the idea that time is relative and not fixed, inspired by Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He got the idea from watching Cheese melt on a hot summer's day.
8. He had a phobia of grasshoppers and of exposing his feet.
9. Always a showman, he once delivered a lecture in a full deep sea diving suit. He almost suffocated, but refused to take it off until the lecture was over.
10. A Dali drawing was hung in the dining room of the Rikers Island jail in New York for sixteen years. Eventually, the authorities decided it wasn't safe there and moved the picture to the prison lobby - from whence it was stolen in 2003 and has never been found.