What Famous Person Do You Share a Birthday With?
 

Saw this topic in another group and it is a fun topic.

Who do you share a birthday with?

Me, I celebrate on the same day as:
Jimi Hendrix
Bruce Lee
Chick Hearn
Jaleel White (Steve Urkel)
Robin Givens
Caroline Kennedy
Eddie Rabbit
Buffalo Bob Smith

And apparently I was born on the same day as Rebecca Michelle Ferratti, the May 1986 Playboy Playmate

One of my favorite bits of utterly pointless trivia about myself: I share my birthday with Harry S Truman. And my was born one year to the day after he died.

Gael García Bernal
Clay Aiken
Prince Akishino of Japan
Ben Stiller
Billy Idol
Mandy Patinkin
David Mamet
Ridley Scott
Abbie Hoffman
G. Gordon Liddy
Dick Clark
Robert Guillaume
Richard Crenna
Allan Sherman
Virginia Mayo
Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
Sir Winston Churchill
Mark Twain
Andrea Palladio
Andrea Doria (the explorer, not the ship)

Colin Powell.

Meryl Streep
Steve Martin
Cyndi Lauper
Donald Faison
Alicia Goranson.

There's, like, a lot more celebrities with my b-day date, but I can't really remember anyone else.

EDIT* John Dillinger also shares my birthday. I feel so dangerous.

Mickey Mouse, a few B-list celebrities....

And apparently Owen Wilson and I are the exact same age - same date of birth.

Princess Diana

Born the same day as Nixon, and I remember when Truman died. We got the day from school. Same with LBJ, who died around the same time.

All of which calls to mind the question for you late '70s born types: About what events do you look at people born ten or so years later and say, "I pity those yutes because they don't remember _____."

Me, I remember the moon landing, Watergate, Viet Nam and even the 1968 assassinations with some clarity. Not to mention the 1969 Mets and that great early 70s CBS Saturday night lineup. Someone older than I am might say, "So what, you didn't cry for JFK." Someone even old would bring up WWII.

So?

First things that come to mind:

Gulf War Episode I
Fall of the wall
Kirk Gibson's homerun
The birth of MTV
The arrival of VCRs
LA Riots
Challenger

A select few (birthdays):

Neko Case
Dave Stewart (Eurythmics)
Great Kabuki (sumo wrestler)
Patsy Cline
Peter Sellers
Jimmie Rodgers

I'm surprised that, for as many people as I have met that share my birthday (non-famous, of course) there aren't more famous people.

GD hit the main memories, I dare suspect.

I'd have to search to find more.

A longer list of notables that share my b-day:

Oscar Hammerstein
David Attenborough
Don Rickles
Sonny Liston
Thomas Pynchon
Bill Cowher
Lovie Smith
Ronnie Lott
Michel Gondry
Mellisa Gilbert
Bobby Labonte
Enrique Iglesias
Martha Wainwright
Adrian Gonzalez

Thanks to Wikipedia:

Goethe
Tolstoy
Charles Boyer
Bruno Bettelheim
Jack Kirby
Donald O'Connor
David Soul
Lou Piniella
David Fincher
Jack Black

Dan Marino. same day, same year

You share my mother's birthday as well.

He meant to say, "And my sister was born one year to the day after he died."

I share my bday with Golda Meir and James Brown. And as I just learned, Levi Johnston, of Bristol Palin fame. :rolleyes:

Pretty much all the rest on my list are people I haven't heard of.

Yup. Challenger being at the top of my list. There was the space program before, and the space program the day after. The fall of the wall was huge but I can't say I understood it at the time as well as I should have.



Imagine explaining to Theo about a pre-9/11 world. He was born 8.5 years after it happened. I can't believe it's as far removed from him as the moon landing is from me. :eek:

Well, there is David Ball from Soft Cell
Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols
Doug Henning (Magician)
Frankie Valli (singer)
Engelbert Humperdinck (Singer)
Sugar Ray Robinson (Boxer)
Pete Seeger (Folk Musician)
Mary Astor (Actress)
Bing Crosby (Crooner)
Zoltan Korda (Director of Jungle Book and other movies)

I didn't think you got off that easily ;)

A few that caught my eye on Wikipedia:

1770 – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher (d. 1831)
1877 – Charles Rolls, British co-founder of Rolls-Royce (d. 1910)
1899 – C. S. Forester, British author (d. 1966)
1906 – Ed Gein, American serial killer (d. 1984)
1908 – Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States (d. 1973)
1916 – Martha Raye, American actress (d. 1994)
1942 – Daryl Dragon, American keyboardist (Captain & Tennille)
1947 – Harry Reems, American actor
1949 – Jeff Cook, vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass, fiddle, banjo and mandolin for Alabama
1950 – Charles Fleischer, American actor
1952 – Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman), American actor
1953 – Alex Lifeson, Canadian guitarist (Rush)
1953 – Peter Stormare, Swedish-born actor
1961 – Tom Ford, American fashion designer
1977 – Mase, American rapper

Calling him an actor is being generous

I don't know of anyone of note born on my birthday. I'm not gonna look it up, because I would have already made a mental note of anyone noteworthy.

Of course, as I've pointed out many times ... my daughter Shanti shares a birthday with Walt Disney, which made for many fun Disneyland trips during her wonderful childhood.

* * * * *

As for things most people I'm friends with can never remember ... I hold high among 'em - Woodstock, Beatlemania, Richard Nixon's resignation, JFK's assassination, Star Wars summer, and in general - the 60's!

And how much generosity does one man deserve?

Speaking, in that context, of movies, and maybe this is just me since I was only 16 at the time and not particularly well versed in movie history yet - but Pulp Fiction. To me it has always felt like a landmark movie, after which the entire filmmaking landscape was changed.

Elizabeth Tudor
Herman Hesse
René Lacoste
Thurgood Marshall
Imelda Marcos
Dave Thomas (the Wendy's guy)
Polly Holliday
Richard Petty
Vicente Fox
Larry David
Jerry Hall
Mark Kermode
Ashley Tisdale
Lindsay Lohan

Good one, for sure.

Big enough that I was able to disguise a horrible haircut by lopping it off, myself and dying my hair dark, a la Miss Mia Wallace.

And it was cool.

RStar

Riot Grrls
"Just Say No"

*Partially redacted list

I share birthdays with:

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Alfred Nobel
• Martin Gardner
• Dizzy Gillespie
• Carrie Fisher

Jack Kerouac and Francois Truffaut both died on anniversaries of my birth.

Really, Pulp Fiction?


Merely a blip, I'd say. I don't remember weeks of people lining up for hours, or constant talk about it, or pop culture after-effects galore.


Within 4 brief years, I lived through The Exorcist, Jaws and Star Wars. These were films that changed the world. Pulp Fiction may have influenced cinema .... but, to bring it back around to the original tangent of the topic at hand ... it's too bad so many of my friends didn't get to groove on the absolute MANIA of the 3 films I mentioned. Pulp Fiction had no such effect.

Not to cast aspersions on its quality as a film ... merely as a phenomena

The first I'll grant, the other two (constant talk, pop culture after-effect) - you just didn't see it. It's all ANYONE I knew talked about for a year. I knew the entire soundtrack, including the bits of dialog that made it onto the album, before I'd even seen the movie. You couldn't turn a corner without seeing a "Bad Ass Motherfvcker" wallet hanging from a chain on someone's belt. And I don't think its affect on movie makers, and movie audiences, can be overstated. Memento doesn't get made if Pulp Fiction hadn't turned the general public on to time-out-of-joint movie telling (not that it was invented for Pulp Fiction, but PF's catapulted it from art-house device to common practice). Fight Club never gets made without Pulp Fiction paving the way for combining violence/comedy/philosophy.

Not that any of that was new at the time, but it wasn't mainstream, and Pulp Fiction, for people of my generation at least, completely altered expectations the audience had of film makers, and vice versa.

Lines and mania are not the only measure of a movie's influence.

By your definition, the Star Wars prequels have more cache than Pulp Fiction.

I'd also like to point out that all the movies you mentioned came out before you turned 30.

The question was seminal moments for people of my generation. Whether they were seminal for YOU can largely be seen as irrelevant. I would venture that, as a rule, people born in the early 40s would ascribe far less significance to Jaws and Close Encounters than you do. Doesn't make your experience of them any less valid.

I only know of one off the top of my head - Hugh Hefner.

What GD said about Pulp Fiction.

Also - Burton's Batman. I'll never forget that. Changed the comic book and action genres irreversibly, not to mention movie making in general. And everyone talked about it for a year solid. Even I saw it in theaters twice, and I was only 12 years old.

Along those lines...I remember when ET came out on home video and I saw it at a friend's sleepover party. As I read years later, ET was the film that set the VHS market on fire, with it's newly affordable price tag and cross-market appeal. People bought VCRs in order to own that film. All I knew at the time was that I blown away.

Didn't mean to imply your experience was invalid, GD ... but I just never noted any such thing about Pulp Fiction. I appreciate your providing some details, and I don't get how I missed them.

CP's reference to Batman I grok. I remember all the public hoo-ha about that. When was that released in comparison to Pulp Fiction? I wonder why I never noticed the Pulp Fiction buzz.

I may have slacked off on popular music once I got older, but one thing I've kept my finger on the pulse of is movies. To this day, I'm pretty savvy on what movies hit the zeitgeist. Though apparently, I miss some.

Moviewise, at least, I think the premise is getting somewhat lost here. Would you really say that someone born in the late '80s had missed out on a historical moment because they were not around when "Pulp Fiction" or "Batman" came out. For that to be true, there has to have been significant controversy about what they accomplished. I don't think anybody rioted over these art forms the way they did about "Rites of Spring" or other avant garde endeavors in the early 20th Century.

By that standard, I would say that of the movies on ISM's list, "The Exorcist" is the most relevant. I would say that "Deep Throat" is more relevant than any of the other movies that have been talked about so far.

While the fall of the wall has been mentioned, I would think you late '70s types would say that not having lived through Reagan's presidency was a major loss.

Does something have to be contentious to be noteworthy? Have I forgotten the history chapter about the Great Bob Newhart/Mary Tyler Moore Race Wars of '73?

To me, the world was different after Pulp Fiction. There's a pretty clear dividing line in my head between "movies before Pulp Fiction" and "movies after pulp fiction", to a degree where someone who has never known a movie landscape without the influence of Pulp Fiction doesn't really know what it was like to watch movies beforehand. It's very possible (if not likely) that it was less that it directly lead to a rise in certain themes and styles in movies, and more that it made me aware of them and prompted me to seek them out. But if so, I feel pretty secure in saying I was not alone, that a LOT of people's perceptions of movies changed in '94.

Similar to me listing the VCR. It's not necessarily about some singular "I remember where I was the moment X happened" event. What often sticks in my mind are the shifts in how we consume our culture, and how our culture communicates to us. The VCR inexorably changed how we interface with media. Pulp Fiction inexorably changed the tone and style of the media we consumed. Controversial or not, it, from where I was sitting in '94, made a huge impact.

Well, with the exception of Jaws, I wasn't really pointing to those three movies as ones that made an impact on me and my sphere, but rather on the world at large. You could not escape news stories about The Exorcist, or the public craze over Star Wars.

I think Jaws was more of a thing in my sphere because I lived in a beach town - - where the public reluctance to go on the water was keenly felt and palpable.


I don't think movies need be controversial to make a big public splash. ET was another one, as CP pointed out, that seemed to have a big effect on the public at large. If Pulp Fiction had a similar effect, I completely missed it.

Pulp Fiction had the power to make John Travolta relevant again. 'nuff said. :p

Batman was 1989, and as mentioned Pulp Fiction was 1994.

Funny gag, but having grown up in a conservative household, I was in a bit of shock when Clinton won in 1992. What would the world be like with a DEMOCRAT in the White House? How could this ever possibly happen? Wasn't it obvious that he was an adulterer? Was he going to tax and spend us all into the poor house? I was truly frightened of this brave new world.

I think that a mass feeling toward something by a generation (not all generations) should constitute relevancy for that generation, which is what I thought we were talking about here. Not, how does a child of the 60s or 70s feel about what a child of the 80s felt was impactful...

What about Seinfeld? A square to spare, anyone?

Edited for clarity...

Yep, you win.

And it took a rap group to put Aerosmith back on the map!

Alan Hale Jr.
Gary Numan
Kat Von D
Micky Dolenz
Lynn Redgrave