Famous birthdays by month
Famous Birthdays in January
Who was born in January? Browse the best-known birthdays for every day of the month, then tap any date to see everyone famous born on that day.
The most famous January birthdays865
1929–1968Martin Luther King Jr.
Baptist minister who led the American civil rights movement, delivered the I Have a Dream speech and won the Nobel Peace Prize
ActivismWould be 97
View profile Photo: Associated Press · Public domain
1935–1977Elvis Presley
The King of Rock and Roll, whose hits such as Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog and electrifying stage moves changed popular music
MusicWould be 91
View profile Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. · Public domain
1942–2018Stephen Hawking
Cambridge physicist who revealed that black holes emit radiation and wrote the bestseller A Brief History of Time despite motor neurone disease
ScienceWould be 84
View profile Photo: NASA · Public domain
1756–1791Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Austrian child prodigy turned composer of more than 600 works, including The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and the Requiem
MusicDied aged 35
View profile Photo: Barbara Krafft · Public domain
b. 1930Buzz Aldrin
Apollo 11 astronaut and lunar module pilot who became the second person to walk on the Moon, after Neil Armstrong
SpaceAge 96
View profile Photo: NASA · Public domain
1882–1945Franklin Delano Roosevelt
32nd US President, elected four times, who led America through the Great Depression with the New Deal and through most of the Second World War
PoliticsWould be 144
View profile Photo: Leon Perskie · CC BY 2.0
1860–1904Anton Chekhov
Russian playwright and short-story master who wrote The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard
LiteratureDied aged 44
View profile Photo: Unknown author · Public domain
1809–1849Edgar Allan Poe
American writer of macabre tales and poems, including The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart, and a pioneer of detective fiction
LiteratureDied aged 40
View profile Photo: Unknown author Unknown author ; Restored by Yann Forget and Adam Cuerden · Public domain
January birthdays, day by day
- January 1
- J. D. Salinger (1919) · American author of The Catcher in the Rye, narrated by Holden Caulfield, who withdrew from public life
- Pierre de Coubertin (1863) · French educator who founded the International Olympic Committee and revived the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896
- Alexander VI (1431) · Controversial Pope and head of the powerful Borgia family
- January 2
- Isaac Asimov (1920) · American science-fiction writer of the Foundation series and I, Robot, who formulated the Three Laws of Robotics
- Thérèse of Lisieux (1873) · French Catholic saint known as the Little Flower of Jesus
- Rudolf Clausius (1822) · Physicist who formulated the second law of thermodynamics
- January 3
- J. R. R. Tolkien (1892) · Oxford professor who wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, creating Middle-earth and shaping modern fantasy
- Michael Schumacher (1969) · German racing driver who won seven Formula One world championships, five of them in a row with Ferrari
- Greta Thunberg (2003) · Swedish activist who began a solo school strike for climate at 15 in 2018, inspiring a global youth movement
- January 4
- Gao Xingjian (1940) · Nobel Prize-winning author of the novel Soul Mountain
- Louis Braille (1809) · Educator who invented the reading and writing system for the blind
- Toni Kroos (1990) · Highly decorated German footballer who played for Real Madrid
- January 5
- Umberto Eco (1932) · Italian semiotician and novelist whose medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose became an international bestseller
- Konrad Adenauer (1876) · Former Mayor of Cologne who became West Germany's first chancellor and led its post-war recovery and alliance with the West
- Bradley Cooper (1975) · American actor of The Hangover and Silver Linings Playbook who directed and starred in A Star Is Born and Maestro
- January 6
- Joan of Arc (1412) · French peasant girl who lifted the siege of Orléans in the Hundred Years' War, was burned at the stake and later made a saint
- Kahlil Gibran (1883) · Lebanese-American poet and painter whose book The Prophet, a collection of poetic essays, has sold millions of copies worldwide
- Rowan Atkinson (1955) · English comedian and actor who created Mr Bean and starred as Blackadder in the classic BBC comedy
- January 7
- Millard Fillmore (1800) · 13th US President and the last Whig in the office, who signed the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act
- Jeremy Renner (1971)
- Nicolas Cage (1964) · American actor of Raising Arizona and Face/Off, famed for his wild intensity, who won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas
- January 8
- Elvis Presley (1935) · The King of Rock and Roll, whose hits such as Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog and electrifying stage moves changed popular music
- Stephen Hawking (1942) · Cambridge physicist who revealed that black holes emit radiation and wrote the bestseller A Brief History of Time despite motor neurone disease
- Kim Jong-un (1982) · Supreme Leader of North Korea since 2011, the third of his family to rule, who has expanded the country's nuclear weapons programme
- January 9
- Richard Nixon (1913) · 37th US President who opened relations with China but resigned in 1974 over the Watergate scandal, the only president to do so
- Simone de Beauvoir (1908) · French existentialist philosopher whose book The Second Sex became a foundational text of modern feminism
- Karel Čapek (1890) · Czech writer whose 1920 play R.U.R. introduced the word robot, and author of the satire War with the Newts
- January 10
- Sergei Eisenstein (1898) · Soviet director of Battleship Potemkin, whose Odessa Steps sequence pioneered montage editing, and of Alexander Nevsky
- Donald Knuth (1938) · Computer scientist and author of The Art of Computer Programming
- Leonid Kravchuk (1934) · First president of independent Ukraine following the Soviet collapse
- January 11
- William James (1842) · American philosopher and psychologist who wrote The Principles of Psychology and helped found the school of pragmatism
- Alexander Hamilton (1755) · American Founding Father and first US Secretary of the Treasury
- Matteo Renzi (1975) · Former Prime Minister of Italy who served from 2014 to 2016
- January 12
- Jack London (1876) · American adventure writer of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, inspired by his time in the Klondike Gold Rush
- Swami Vivekananda (1863) · Indian Hindu monk whose speech at the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago introduced yoga and Vedanta to the West
- Haruki Murakami (1949) · Japanese novelist of Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, known for dreamlike, surreal fiction
- January 13
- Orlando Bloom (1977) · Actor famous for playing Legolas and Will Turner
- Wilhelm Wien (1864) · Nobel Prize-winning physicist known for his laws on thermal radiation
- Karl Liebknecht (1871) · German socialist leader and co-founder of the Spartacus League
- January 14
- Albert Schweitzer (1875) · Alsatian theologian, organist and doctor who ran a hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, and won the Nobel Peace Prize
- Jason Bateman (1969) · American actor and director who starred in Arrested Development and Ozark, winning an Emmy for directing
- Yukio Mishima (1925) · Japanese novelist of Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion who died by ritual suicide after a failed coup
- January 15
- Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) · Baptist minister who led the American civil rights movement, delivered the I Have a Dream speech and won the Nobel Peace Prize
- Molière (1622) · French playwright and actor whose comedies, including Tartuffe and The Misanthrope, satirised hypocrisy and remain classics of the stage
- Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918) · Egyptian army officer who overthrew the monarchy, nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and led the Arab nationalist movement
- January 16
- Susan Sontag (1933) · American critic and author known for her essays on culture
- Fulgencio Batista (1901) · Cuban military leader and president ousted by the 1959 revolution
- Aaliyah (1979) · American R&B singer and actress known as the Princess of R&B
- January 17
- Benjamin Franklin (1706) · American Founding Father, printer and scientist who experimented with lightning and helped draft the Declaration of Independence
- Muhammad Ali (1942) · Three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who called himself The Greatest and refused the Vietnam draft on principle
- Michelle Obama (1964) · Chicago lawyer who served as US First Lady from 2009 to 2017 and wrote the best-selling memoir Becoming
- January 18
- Montesquieu (1689) · his theory of separation of powers in The Spirit of Law which shaped constitutional design in America and beyond
- Kevin Costner (1955) · American actor of The Untouchables and The Bodyguard who won Oscars for directing Dances with Wolves and starred in Yellowstone
- Cary Grant (1904) · Debonair leading man of Hollywood’s Golden Age
- January 19
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809) · American writer of macabre tales and poems, including The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart, and a pioneer of detective fiction
- James Watt (1736) · Scottish engineer whose improvements to the steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution; the unit of power is named after him
- Paul Cézanne (1839) · French Post-Impressionist painter of Mont Sainte-Victoire and still lifes with apples, whose work paved the way for Cubism
- January 20
- Buzz Aldrin (1930) · Apollo 11 astronaut and lunar module pilot who became the second person to walk on the Moon, after Neil Armstrong
- Federico Fellini (1920) · Italian director of La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8½ whose dreamlike films won four Oscars for best foreign-language film
- André-Marie Ampère (1775) · French physicist who founded electrodynamics; the ampere, the unit of electric current, is named after him
- January 21
- Grigori Rasputin (1869) · Siberian mystic who won the trust of Tsar Nicholas II's family by easing their son's haemophilia and was murdered in 1916
- IShowSpeed (2005) · American YouTube personality and live streamer known for gaming content
- Paul Allen (1953) · Co-founder of Microsoft and owner of various sports teams
- January 22
- Lord Byron (1788) · English Romantic poet of Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, famous for his scandalous life and death in the Greek war of independence
- Francis Bacon (1561) · English philosopher and statesman who championed observation and experiment, laying the groundwork for the scientific method
- Antonio Gramsci (1891) · Italian Marxist thinker who co-founded the Italian Communist Party and wrote his influential Prison Notebooks in Mussolini's jails
- January 23
- David Hilbert (1862) · German mathematician who set the famous 23 Hilbert problems in 1900 and shaped geometry, logic and mathematical physics
- Stendhal (1783) · French novelist of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, a pioneer of psychological realism
- Édouard Manet (1832) · French painter of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia whose bold modern scenes shocked Paris and inspired the Impressionists
- January 24
- Frederick II of Prussia (1712) · Prussian king known as Frederick the Great, a brilliant general and Enlightenment patron who made Prussia a great power
- Luis Suárez (1987) · Uruguayan striker who is his country's record goalscorer and starred for Ajax, Liverpool and Barcelona
- Hadrian (AD 76) · Roman emperor who built Hadrian's Wall across northern Britain, rebuilt the Pantheon and travelled throughout his empire
- January 25
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy (1978) · Comedian and actor who became President of Ukraine in 2019 and has led the country's resistance to Russia's full-scale invasion
- Thomas Aquinas (1225) · Italian Dominican friar whose Summa Theologica combined Christian faith with Aristotle's philosophy and shaped Catholic theology
- Virginia Woolf (1882) · English modernist writer of Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own, and a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group
- January 26
- Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918) · Communist dictator of Romania for 24 years who was overthrown and executed with his wife in the 1989 revolution
- Douglas MacArthur (1880) · American five-star general who led Allied forces in the Pacific, ran post-war Japan and commanded UN troops in Korea
- José Mourinho (1963) · Portuguese manager known as the Special One who won the Champions League with Porto and Inter and league titles in four countries
- January 27
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756) · Austrian child prodigy turned composer of more than 600 works, including The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and the Requiem
- Lewis Carroll (1832) · Oxford mathematician who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and the nonsense poem Jabberwocky
- Wilhelm II (1859) · Last German Emperor and King of Prussia, whose aggressive policies helped lead to the First World War and who abdicated in 1918
- January 28
- Nicolas Sarkozy (1955) · Centre-right politician who served as President of France from 2007 to 2012 and was later convicted in corruption cases
- Jackson Pollock (1912) · American Abstract Expressionist painter famous for dripping and pouring paint onto canvases laid on the floor
- Gianluigi Buffon (1978) · Italian goalkeeper who won the 2006 World Cup, ten Serie A titles with Juventus and earned 176 caps for Italy
- January 29
- Anton Chekhov (1860) · Russian playwright and short-story master who wrote The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard
- Romain Rolland (1866) · French novelist of Jean-Christophe and biographer of Beethoven, a committed pacifist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature
- William McKinley (1843) · 25th US President who led the country through the Spanish-American War and was assassinated in 1901
- January 30
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882) · 32nd US President, elected four times, who led America through the Great Depression with the New Deal and through most of the Second World War
- Felipe VI of Spain (1968) · King of Spain since his father Juan Carlos abdicated in 2014, a former Olympic sailor
- Dick Cheney (1941)
- January 31
- Franz Schubert (1797) · Austrian composer of more than 600 songs, the Unfinished Symphony and the Trout Quintet, who died at only 31
- Justin Timberlake (1981)
- Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) · Japanese novelist of A Personal Matter and Hiroshima Notes, a campaigner against nuclear weapons, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature