December Celebrity Birthdays
A look at the famous and the fascinating on the day they were born
AARP Members Only Access, December 2021
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PHOTO BY: Rich Polk/Getty Images for Netflix
Dec. 31: Actor Anthony Hopkins, 84
Earlier this year, at the age of 83, Sir Anthony Hopkins turned in a devastating performance as a man suffering from dementia in The Father, pulling off an upset best actor win to become the oldest person to ever win a competitive Oscar. Born in Wales on December 31, 1937, Hopkins has made a career of playing complex historic and literary figures, and he doesn’t rely on any kind of Method trickery to get closer to his characters: His acting technique involves simply reading and rereading scripts about 250 times, adding a doodle each go-around, leaving the pages smothered in scribbles and drawings. In addition to The Father, the system has won Hopkins five other Academy Award nominations, for playing cannibalistic killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (for which he won in 1992), a dutiful butler in Remains of the Day, presidents Richard Nixon (Nixon) and John Quincy Adams (Amistad), and Pope Benedict XVI in The Two Popes. Hopkins, who was knighted in 1993, is keeping busy, and this year, his sci-fi thriller Zero Contact became the first feature-film NFT, or non-fungible token — don’t ask, we don’t get it, either. Next, Hopkins will team back up with The Father director Florian Zeller on The Son; much like their last Oscar-winning collaboration, the film will be based on one of Zeller’s plays, and we’re sure it will wreck us emotionally just like its cinematic dad did. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage/Getty Images
Dec. 30: Singer Patti Smith, 75
Often called punk’s poet laureate, Patti Smith, 75, burst onto the New York underground scene in the 1970s with her raw and powerful downtown club performances. But she really hit the big time with her seminal 1975 album Horses, which featured a stark and now-iconic black-and-white portrait of Smith by her partner, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. “Patti Smith is the hottest rock poet to emerge from the fecund wastes of New Jersey since Bruce Springsteen,” critic John Rockwell wrote in his review for Rolling Stone, which would later name Horses the 26th best album of all time. “But Smith is not like Springsteen or anybody else at all. Springsteen is a rocker; Smith is a chanting rock and roll poet.” Born on December 30, 1946, in Chicago and raised in New Jersey, she later collaborated with her fellow Garden Stater on “Because the Night,” which would become her biggest radio hit. But the words were always more important than the charts, and in 2005, she was named a commander of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. After being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, she began releasing her memoirs: 2010’s Just Kids, about her relationship with Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award for nonfiction; 2015’s M Train is all about travel (and her obsession with TV detective shows); and 2019’s Year of the Monkey is a dreamlike and often surreal work about a single year in Smith’s life. Never one to stay put for too long, Smith is heading back out on the road: You can help ring in her 75th year tonight at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, or catch her in the spring on a tour that will take her through Australia, New Zealand and Europe. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Robert Trachtenberg/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Dec. 29: Actor Ted Danson, 74
Even if Ted Danson, 74, never played another character besides the pitcher-turned-bartender Sam Malone, his 275 episodes of Cheers would be enough to enter him into the pantheon of TV stars. But the sitcom legend, who was born on Dec. 29, 1947, in San Diego, has spent the nearly 30 years since Cheers went off the air starring in countless other series and dipping his toe (successfully!) into everything from crime procedurals to legal thrillers to supernatural comedies. Earlier this year, Danson premiered his new NBC sitcom Mr. Mayor, in which he plays a retired businessman with no political experience who runs for mayor of Los Angeles — and wins. At the time, the website The Ringer analyzed the careers of long-running television icons; excluding folks like professional wrestlers and soap stars, Danson ranks second, after only Michael Landon, as the most prolific TV star of all time, with 768 episodes under his belt at the time and counting. How did he get to this point? After Cheers ended, he starred as Dr. John Becker on Becker for six seasons, billionaire CEO Arthur Frobisher on Damages, supervisor D.B. Russell on the CSI franchise, magazine editor George Christopher on Bored to Death, Sheriff Hank Larsson on Fargo, actor Ted Danson (or at least a loosely fictionalized version) on Curb Your Enthusiasm and afterlife architect Michael on The Good Place. Along the way, he picked up 18 Primetime Emmy nominations, winning twice for his work as Sam Malone. Since 1984, Danson has also been a tireless advocate for protecting our oceans; after fighting to stop 60 oil wells from being drilled near Santa Monica, he cofounded the American Oceans Campaign, which later merged with Oceana, on which he still serves on the board of directors. We know Mr. Mayor is fictional, but with his charisma, his do-gooder spirit and his impressive résumé, Ted Danson would get our vote, too. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images
Dec. 28: Actress Maggie Smith, 87
One of the most celebrated actresses of her (or any) generation, Maggie Smith was born on December 28, 1934 and quickly racked up a list of some of the greatest theater roles in history, from Desdemona to Lady Macbeth, Miss Julie to Hedda Tesman. With her performances on stage and screen, she became the 15th person to achieve the triple crown of acting, earning two Oscars (for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite), a Tony (Lettice and Lovage) and four Emmys (one for My House in Umbria and three for Downton Abbey). Beyond the industry accolades, Smith was also named a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1990, and in 2014, Queen Elizabeth II honored her as only the third actress — after Sybil Thorndike and Judi Dench — to be a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. Younger generations may know Smith for her scene-stealing parts in two blockbuster franchises: Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films and Violet Crawley, dowager countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey, its 2019 film spin-off and next spring’s sequel Downton Abbey: A New Era, in which the Crawley clan plans a royal visit from the king and queen. If she isn’t careful, Smith could end up with another honorary title! —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Dec. 27: Broadcaster Savannah Guthrie, 50
With her bright smile and deft skill as an interviewer, Savannah Guthrie, 50, makes hosting Today look easy — which is even more impressive considering what a fraught and challenging time it was when she joined the morning juggernaut. Born on Dec. 27, 1971 in Melbourne, Australia, Guthrie graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and earned the highest score on the Arizona bar exam in July 2002, out of 634 participants. Once she joined NBC News, she worked her way up from White House correspondent to chief legal correspondent, eventually becoming cohost of the third hour of Today in June 2011. In 2012, she was named coanchor, navigating rough waters after the tearful ousting of her predecessor, Ann Curry, and she has remained a calming, steady presence through thick and thin, especially when she had to announce the firing of her on-air partner Matt Lauer over inappropriate sexual behavior. “As I’m sure you can imagine, we are devastated, and we are still processing all of this, and I will tell you right now, we do not know more than what I just shared with you,” she said on that fateful November 2017 morning. “But we will be covering this story as reporters, as journalists. I’m sure we will be learning more details in the hours and days to come, and we promise we will share that with you.” In 2018, Guthrie was joined behind the anchor desk by Hoda Kotb, marking the first time two women hosted Today, and she proved her journalistic bona fides once again with her October 2020 performance in a town hall opposite President Donald Trump. She did such a fantastic job that SNL’s Kate McKinnon introduced herself that Saturday, in character, as “surprise badass Savannah Guthrie.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jenny Lewis/Contour by Getty Images
Dec. 26: Writer David Sedaris, 65
There’s something at once delightfully old-fashioned and refreshingly modern about the writings of humorist and essayist David Sedaris, 65, who has been compared to everyone from Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker to Woody Allen and Fran Lebowitz. Born on Dec. 26, 1956, as one of six siblings (including comedian Amy Sedaris), Sedaris dropped out of college and hitchhiked across the country, where he began jotting down notes on diner placemats. These wry observations, especially about his family and his series of odd jobs (apple picker, apartment cleaner, holiday elf at Macy’s…), have provided the fodder for his best-selling essay collections and memoirs, such as Barrel Fever, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day and Calypso. Combined, more than 16 million copies of his books are in print. These days, the winner of the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor lives with his longtime partner Hugh Hamrick in a 16th-century farmhouse in rural England, where he’s taken up a new pastime: going for long walks through the countryside, sometimes spending up to nine hours picking up trash on the side of the road. His do-gooder streak even caught the attention of the Queen, who invited him to a garden party for volunteers at Buckingham Palace. This year he mined his years of personal jottings and reflections for his second collection of diary entries, A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020). He writes in the introduction, “I’ll remind the reader that this is my edit, a tiny fraction of what I’ve written to myself over the past eighteen years. I haven’t gone out of my way to appear thoughtful and virtuous but could easily look much, much worse than I do in these pages.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times/Contour RA by Getty Images
Dec. 25: Singer Annie Lennox, 67
Known for piercing contralto vocals that can swoop from operatic highs to bluesy depths and a transgressively androgynous look, Scottish singer-songwriter Annie Lennox, 67, burst onto the British music scene in the 1980s as one-half of the pop duo Eurythmics. Together with bandmate Dave Stewart, Lennox — who was born on Christmas Day 1954 in Aberdeen — recorded pop hits that were unlike anything else on the radio, such as “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and “Here Comes the Rain Again.” She continued her reign in the ’90s with a string of solo records that included “Why,” “No More ‘I Love You’s’” and “Walking on Broken Glass,” and she later won the Academy Award for best original song for “Into the West” from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Rolling Stone included the four-time Grammy winner on its greatest singers of all-time list in 2010, and Matchbox Twenty singer Rob Thomas said of her powerhouse vocals: “Annie is amazingly versatile. She can sound like a beautiful angel — or she can make it sound like she’s gargling glass. A great singer is somebody who makes you believe what they’re saying, and you always believe Annie.” In 2018, the activist and humanitarian was named the first female chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, and she has continued to fight for a better world with organizations like Greenpeace, Amnesty International and The Circle, her own NGO dedicated to helping women and girls fight for justice and equality — or, as she famously sang alongside Aretha Franklin, helping sisters do it for themselves. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
Dec. 24: Dr. Anthony Fauci, 81
Aside from perhaps Tiger King or Squid Game, Anthony Fauci, 81, is the undisputed breakout of the pandemic era — and he did it all while simply being humble and good at his job. Go figure! Shortly after COVID-19 began its global spread, President Trump appointed the nation’s leading infectious disease expert to his newly formed coronavirus taskforce in January 2020, and he soon emerged as a reassuring presence and a font of useful information for an American populace starved for answers. If it seemed as if he came out of nowhere, you just haven’t been paying attention: Born on Dec. 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, he attended Cornell Medical College and later joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 1968, becoming the group’s director in 1984. In the early days, he was faced with the challenges of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Playwright and activist Larry Kramer, who spent decades criticizing Fauci for government inaction, later referred to him as “the only true and great hero” among government officials, thanks to his tireless research efforts. In the years since, under six presidents, Fauci has battled SARS, Zika, Ebola and flus of both the swine and avian varieties, and he’s picked up the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science and recently the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal. But it wasn’t until recently that he became something of a pop culture phenomenon. Both Brad Pitt and Kate McKinnon played him on Saturday Night Live, he threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals home opener (and was honored with a collectible bobblehead doll) and he was the subject of a National Geographic documentary called Fauci that’s available to stream on Disney+. And he even inspired a whimsical nickname for the game-changing vaccine: the “Fauci ouchie.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images
Dec. 23: Singer Eddie Vedder, 57
A defining voice of the grunge era, Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, 57, is sadly the last surviving frontman from the ’90s genre’s biggest bands. As many of his peers succumbed to addiction and suicide, Vedder — who was born on Dec. 23, 1964, in Chicago — has continued making music, both with Pearl Jam and solo, for going on three decades. This August marked the 30th anniversary of the band’s seminal debut album, Ten, and since those early days the Seattle rockers have racked up a Grammy win (out of 12 nominations) and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. “They’re true living cultural organisms,” David Letterman said of the band in his sweet induction speech. “They would recognize injustice, and they would stand up for it. Whether it was human rights or the environment, whether it was poverty, they didn’t let it wash over them. They would stand up and react.” Vedder, whom Rolling Stone readers voted the seventh-best lead singer of all time, made his solo debut in 2007 with the soundtrack of the Sean Penn–directed film Into the Wild, and he partnered with Penn once again on this year’s Flag Day; in a particularly special moment, Vedder got to perform with his 17-year-old daughter, Olivia, who made her professional singing debut with the songs “My Father’s Daughter” and “There’s a Girl.” In February, Vedder is set to release his third solo album, Earthling, followed by a quick six-city tour that will finish, appropriately, in the birthplace of grunge, Seattle. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx/AP Photo
Dec. 22: Journalist Diane Sawyer, 76
Diane Sawyer, 76, had been a storyteller of one form or another for decades before she became one of America’s most trusted broadcast journalists. Born in Kentucky on Dec. 22, 1945, Sawyer won the America’s Junior Miss pageant in 1963, and the thing that pushed her over the top was her essay comparing the music of the North and the South during the Civil War. After she graduated from Wellesley, Sawyer worked as a press aide for the Nixon administration and later helped the disgraced former president pen his memoirs. Soon, she joined CBS, where she worked her way up from State Department correspondent to coanchor of the CBS Morning News, eventually getting her big break in 1984, when she was named the first female anchor of 60 Minutes. In 1989, she made the jump to ABC, where she coanchored Primetime and Good Morning America before occupying the coveted anchor chair on World News from 2009 to 2014. On her first night as host, she faced off against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Iran’s nuclear plans, proving that she’d bring none of the fluff from her morning show days to the evening hour. “Much fuss has been made about the fact that two of the three broadcast anchors are now women,” wrote Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times, “but what Ms. Sawyer’s first nightly news program really signaled is the return of the alpha anchors.” Since leaving the desk in 2014, Sawyer has continued to report for ABC, helping the network earn a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence in Television, and recent projects have included a 20/20 report on the babies of 9/11 widows 20 years later and an exclusive interview with the Turpin sisters, who escaped from their abusive family’s “house of horrors.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Sipa USA/Alamy
Dec. 21: Actress/Activist Jane Fonda, 84
Someone with a résumé as robust as that of Jane Fonda, 84, could easily have spent her octogenarian years relaxing in Malibu and taking the occasional cameo role. Instead, she’s spent the past decade working harder than ever before. Born on Dec. 21, 1937, the daughter of Hollywood legend Henry Fonda became one of the most in-demand actresses of the 1970s, winning Oscars for Klute and Coming Home, in which she played the wife of a Vietnam War soldier. It was during this time that she became an outspoken critic of the war, even going so far as to visit Vietnam in 1972, earning the nickname “Hanoi Jane” from her critics. Throughout the ’80s, she supplemented her roles in acclaimed films like Nine to Five and On Golden Pond with her wildly successful series of workout tapes; is it possible to do aerobics since those videos were released without hearing the phrases “Feel the burn” and “No pain, no gain” in your head? More recently, Fonda teamed back up with her Nine to Five co-star Lily Tomlin on the Netflix sitcom Grace and Frankie, which will finish up its seventh and final season in early 2022. But despite the cushy streaming gig, she never lost her fighting spirit: In 2019, Fonda was arrested five times in Washington, D.C., at climate change protests called Fire Drill Fridays, alongside celebrity friends like Ted Danson, Sally Field and Sam Waterston; and the next year, she released the book What Can I Do? The Path from Climate Despair to Action. In true Fonda fashion, she donated 100 percent of her net proceeds to Greenpeace. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Dec. 20: Producer Dick Wolf, 75
In terms of sheer quantity of programming, it’s hard to think of a producer or showrunner who has had a bigger impact on the modern television landscape than Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, 75. Born in New York City on Dec. 20, 1946, Wolf got his start writing on series like Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice before hitting it big in 1990 with the premiere of his crime procedural Law & Order. Running for 20 seasons, the NBC juggernaut spawned spinoffs and international editions, won six Emmys (out of 51 nominations) and launched the careers ofcountless actors working today. In 2019, one of its spin-offs, Law & Order: SVU, became the longest-running primetime drama in TV history, and next February the original L&O will make its triumphant return for its 21st season — after 12 years off the air. When it returns (with that trademark dun-dun intact, we hope), it will join a whopping eight other Wolf-produced shows on the air this season: on NBC, Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med, Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime; on CBS, FBI, FBI: International and FBI: Most Wanted; with another L&O spin-off called On Call in the works for Peacock. When comparing his long-running workhorses to prestige cable TV shows, he once told The New York Times, “We make Mercedes S-Class sedans. They’re designed to run basically forever and be comfortable and you don’t have to think about much. We don’t make Ferraris.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Dec. 19: Actress Jennifer Beals, 58
In her Golden Globe–nominated turn in Flashdance, Jennifer Beals, 58, starred as Alex Owens, a Pittsburgh welder by day and exotic dancer by night who yearns to attend ballet school. But Beals, in her own way, was also playing double duty: In addition to being one of the breakout actresses of 1983, she was also attending Yale University, where she deferred a term to film her star-making role. Beals would find success once again with the 1995 noir film Devil in a Blue Dress, in which she plays the namesake femme fatale. But younger audiences may know her best for her six seasons as the brilliant Bette Porter on Showtime’s groundbreaking lesbian-centered drama The L Word and its recent follow-up series The L Word: Generation Q. This month, she’s trading in her L Word power suits for space duds (and fleshy hornlike appendages) on the new Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett, a spin-off of The Mandalorian in which she’ll play a member of the Twi’lek alien race. — Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Turner
Dec. 18: Filmmaker Steven Spielberg, 75
Perhaps no director in American cinematic history has managed to jump so skillfully between critical and commercial success as Steven Spielberg, 75 — and many times, he achieved both with the same project. Born in Cincinnati on Dec. 18, 1946, the three-time Oscar winner has cast a wide net with the projects he’s helmed, bringing his eye for bighearted blockbusters to such diverse topics as aliens (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), war (Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan), and, well, things with big, sharp teeth (Jaws, Jurassic Park). Along the way, his films have raked in more than $10.5 billion at the global box office, ranking him first on the all-time list of highest-grossing directors. This month, he entered new territory with his first musical, a critically adored and grittier reimagining of 1961’s West Side Story that dives even more deeply into issues of race and gentrification and has been attracting Oscar buzz since it premiered. “It couldn’t be a theater musical,” Spielberg recently told ABC News. “It had to be a street musical. It had to feel like these were the real streets that these stories, these events, and this comedy, and this jubilation, and this tragedy was taking place on.” — Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Marco Campagna/Alamy
Dec. 17: Pope Francis, 85
When white smoke billowed from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel in March 2013, signaling a new pope, many papal prognosticators were shocked by the announcement of the Argentine underdog Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then 76, who would henceforth be known as Pope Francis. Born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936, Francis, now 85, was unlike any leader of the Roman Catholic Church who had come before him: He was the first Jesuit pope, the first to be born in the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere, the first non-European since the Syrian-born Gregory III in the eighth century, and — we’re guessing — the first to have worked as a nightclub bouncer. He was also the first pope to choose the name Francis, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, who shared his humble outlook and dedication to serving the poor. While a traditionalist in many ways with regards to abortion and women in the priesthood, Francis has been known to ruffle the feathers of church conservatives with his conciliatory statements on LGBTQ rights and his support for climate action. “I encourage all those who have political and economic responsibilities to act immediately with courage and farsightedness,″ he said in November at a U.N.-led climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. “At the same time, I invite all persons of good will to carry out active citizenry to care for the common house.” — Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gregg DeGuire/WireImage/Getty Images
Dec. 16: Actor Benjamin Bratt, 58
Best known for his role as Detective Rey Curtis on Law & Order from 1995 to 1999, Benjamin Bratt, 58, was raised to care about justice from an early age. He was born in San Francisco on Dec. 16, 1963, to an Indigenous Quechua mother from Peru who fought for Native American rights and even brought her young kids along to the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island. Over the years, Bratt has appeared in such films as Miss Congeniality and Coco and TV shows like Private Practice and Star, but he has continued to dedicate his efforts to activism and philanthropy as well. In 2009, he narrated the PBS docuseries We Shall Remain: America Through Native Eyes, and in 2017, he helped produce the acclaimed documentary Dolores, about labor leader Dolores Huerta, directed by his brother Peter Bratt. Next up, he’ll star opposite Rosario Dawson as a charismatic gang leader in the Ava DuVernay–produced HBO Max limited series DMZ, about a post-apocalyptic second American Civil War. — Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gary Doak/Writer Pictures/AP Photo
Dec. 15: Writer Edna O’Brien, 91
Hailed as one of the greatest writers of her generation, Edna O’Brien, 91, was born in County Clare on Dec. 15, 1930, and educated in a strict Catholic convent, before training to become a pharmacist. But her childhood love of writing quickly turned into her full-time gig: In 1960, she mined her upbringing for her debut novel, The Country Girls, about two young Irish women who are expelled from school and seek out adventure and love in Dublin. It’s a frank and quietly revolutionary tale of sexual freedom, and it was subsequently banned by the Irish Censorship Board (it wouldn’t be her last time!) and even publicly burned by a local parish priest. A 1967 Irish Times headline summed up her boundary-breaking reputation succinctly: “Who’s afraid of Edna O’Brien?” Over the years, her novels, memoirs, short stories, plays and poems have explored the lives of women in Ireland and the ways they’re impacted by the church, the patriarchy, and the social and sexual mores of a traditionalist society. More recently, she’s begun to cast her gaze outward, writing about a Bosnian Serb war criminal in 2015’s The Little Red Chairs and the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2019’s Girl. This year, O’Brien received France’s highest cultural honor and was named a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, with the French embassy calling her “a committed feminist who offered a voice to women around the world.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images
Dec. 14: Jane Birkin, 75
The British actress and singer — and handbag namesake — will forever be remembered as the muse of the late French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. Born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, Birkin met her future partner and collaborator on the set of the film Slogan, and soon they were making beautiful music together. In 1969, their erotically charged duet “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus” was banned in several countries and denounced by the pope, but that infamy led to skyrocketing sales, making it the first foreign-language single to hit number 1 in the United Kingdom. Even more so than her music and film appearances, Birkin is known as the inspiration for the Birkin bag by Hermès. As legend has it, Birkin was sitting next to the fashion house’s executive chairman Jean-Louis Dumas on a 1984 flight from Paris to London, when she noted that she couldn’t find a bag that fit all her needs as a young mom; he soon whipped up the now-iconic purse, complete with a spot for baby bottles. (In 2015, she wrote to the brand demanding that they take her name off the bag until they addressed issues of cruelty surrounding crocodile farming.) This year, her daughter, actress and musician Charlotte Gainsbourg, made her directorial debut with the documentary Jane by Charlotte, which she joked was a selfish way to hang out with her iconic mom. “I needed to get close to her,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, “and I couldn’t without an excuse.” While a minor stroke kept Birkin from attending film festival appearances, she is said to be doing fine, and the film will be released some time next year. — Nicholas DeRenzo
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Dec. 13: Sitcom legend Dick Van Dyke, 96
When we heard that Dick Van Dyke, 96, was being celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors this year, our first reaction was: What took so long?! After all, it had been six full decades since his breakthrough year of 1961, when he both won a Tony for Bye Bye Birdie and started his five-season run as comedy writer Rob Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. His namesake sitcom earned Van Dyke — who was born in Missouri on Dec. 13, 1925 — three consecutive Emmys and kicked off a run of hit films that showed off his affable song-and-dance-man side, including Mary Poppins in 1964 and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1968. Van Dyke’s career experienced an unexpected second-act resurgence in the ’90s when he starred in TV’s Diagnosis Murder, and he’s continued appearing in films into his 90s, most recently as Mr. Dawes Jr., the retired bank chairman, in 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns. In one climactic scene, Van Dyke dances wildly on top of his desk, and director Rob Marshall said the actor not only didn’t need a stunt double, but he had to “play up” his character’s age. Now sporting a bushy white beard, Van Dyke often performed with his a cappella group, the Vantastix, before the pandemic, and he’s ready to get back onstage. As he told Al Roker this year during an interview on the Today show, “I don’t think I’ll ever retire.” — Nicholas DeRenzo
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Dec. 12: Singer Dionne Warwick, 81
Few singers have come to define the cool sophistication of 1960s pop music more than Dionne Warwick, 81, who was born in New Jersey on Dec. 12, 1940, and began her singing career in the church. A fateful meeting with songwriter and producer Burt Bacharach led to 39 consecutive hits over the next decade, including “Walk On By,” “Don’t Make Me Over” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” In a 1967 Time article, Bacharach said, “She has a tremendous strong side and a delicacy when singing softly — like miniature ships in bottles.” She racked up a few more radio singles in the 1970s and ’80s, including “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” and “That’s What Friends Are For” with Gladys Knight, Elton John and Stevie Wonder, though younger audiences would come to recognize her best as the host of the Psychic Friends Network infomercials. And then, in 2020, Warwick started her surprisingly robust third act. She appeared on The Masked Singer, and in December, she went viral for a tweet directed at Chance the Rapper: “If you are very obviously a rapper, why did you put it in your stage name? I cannot stop thinking about this.” She soon became legendary for her hilariously blunt Twitter presence and her inquisitive, droll interactions with corporations and young music stars, even yielding a Newark gallery show called “Dionne Warwick: Queen of Twitter.” Saturday Night Live began a recurring sketch called the Dionne Warwick Sketch Show, starring Ego Nwodim, and Warwick herself made a cameo this November that sent the live audience into a giddy frenzy. Soon after, she and Chance the Rapper parlayed the viral tweet into a musical collaboration called “Nothing’s Impossible” — which seems like the perfect encapsulation of her octogenarian resurgence. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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Dec. 11: Actress Mo’Nique, 54
Born in Maryland on Dec. 11, 1967, Mo’Nique started her stand-up career after a successful open-mic night appearance spurred her to quit her customer-service job. Soon she was stealing scenes with her guest appearances on the sitcom Moesha — so much so that her character, Nikki Parker, and her daughter Kim (Countess Vaughn) got their own spinoff in which they attended college together. At the same time, Mo’Nique, 54, was anointed stand-up royalty when she joined the raucous and raunchy Queens of Comedy tour, which spawned a decidedly R-rated concert film of the same name and a Grammy-nominated comedy album. In 2009, she pulled a complete 180 with the film Precious, in which she starred as the protagonist’s abusive mother; she was brutal and monstrous, but critics couldn’t look away, and she won a best supporting actress Oscar in the process. On the night of the Academy Awards, she wore white gardenias in her hair as a tribute to Hattie McDaniel and her historic 1940 win, and she channeled another legend of Black entertainment, Ma Rainey, for her Emmy-nominated supporting role in the 2015 HBO biopic Bessie. Last year, she sued Netflix, alleging that the streaming giant was underpaying Black female comedians. “I had a choice to make,” she wrote on Instagram. “I could accept what I felt was pay discrimination or I could stand up for those who came before me and those who will come after me.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Paras Griffin/Getty Images
Dec. 10: Actor-director Kenneth Branagh, 61
You might think of Kenneth Branagh, 61, as a latter-day Sir Laurence Olivier. Born in Belfast on Dec. 10, 1960, the British actor and director made a name for himself as his generation’s finest cinematic interpreter of Shakespeare’s works. In 1989, just a few months after Olivier’s death, Branagh took on one of his most iconic roles when he starred in and directed Henry V, earning Oscar nominations for best director and actor in the process. Over the next few decades, Branagh would go on to adapt or act in a number of the Bard’s other great works, including Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello (1995), Hamlet (1996), Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) and As You Like It (2006), and in a fun twist on Hollywood lore, he played Olivier in the 2011 biopic My Week With Marilyn. Recently, Branagh has turned his attention to the works of another beloved British writer, Agatha Christie. In 2017, he directed a star-studded adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, in which he played the elaborately mustachioed Hercule Poirot, a role he’ll return to in next year’s Death on the Nile. Until then, expect to hear much more about Branagh this awards season, thanks to the semi-autobiographical Belfast, his loving, black-and-white ode to his hometown set amid the political turmoil of the Troubles in the 1960s. It already picked up the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, which has gone on to predict eventual Oscar success for such previous winners as La La Land, 12 Years a Slave and Nomadland. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Juan Naharro G./Contour by Getty Images
Dec. 9: Actress Judi Dench, 87
Just how captivating is Judi Dench as an actress? The 87-year-old legend nabbed her only Oscar (so far) after appearing on-screen for only about eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love. But that’s all the time she needed to bring her twinkly-eyed charisma and wit to the well-trodden role of Queen Elizabeth I. During her acceptance speech, she joked, “I feel for eight minutes on the screen, I should only get a little bit of him.” Born in York on Dec. 9, 1934, the grand dame of British theater (and actual Dame, as of 1988) has taken on such stage roles as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and Sally Bowles in the original 1968 London production of Cabaret. In 1995, Dench broadened her appeal among American audiences with her role as the first female M in the James Bond franchise; her 007 tenure lasted until 2012’s Skyfall (with a cameo in Spectre in 2015), and she still uses the theme song as her ringtone. She’s earned seven Oscar nominations — all after the age of 60 — for playing the likes of Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown and British writer Iris Murdoch in Iris. In 2020, she became the oldest woman to ever appear on the cover of British Vogue, and she’s spoken out forcefully against ageism in the industry. “It’s the rudest word in my dictionary, ‘retire,’ ” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “And ‘old’ is another one. I don’t allow that in my house. And being called ‘vintage.’ I don’t want any of those old words. I like ‘enthusiastic’ and I like the word ‘cut’ because that means you’ve finished the shot.” As if to prove she’s not going anywhere, Dench is attracting Oscar buzz for her role in Kenneth Branagh’s coming-of-age film Belfast, in which she plays the kind of granny any lad would be lucky to have. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Vera Anderson/WireImage/Getty Images
Dec. 8: Film Director Nancy Meyers, 72
Director Nancy Meyers, 72, has dedicated her four-decades-long career to telling the stories of complicated women, beginning with her Oscar-nominated screenplay for Private Benjamin in 1980 and continuing with the yuppie rom-com Baby Boom. Born in Philadelphia on Dec. 8, 1949, Meyers wrote and produced Father of Bride and its sequel before making her directorial debut with the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. She helmed a string of female-led comedies geared toward grownups, including What Women Want, The Holiday and The Intern, but perhaps the two films that have come to best define Meyers’ worldview are 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give and 2009’s It’s Complicated. Starring Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep, respectively, these fizzy romantic comedies are centered around older women with robust sex lives and fantastic tastes in interior design. In fact, the covetable Nancy Meyers kitchen has become something of a trademark, with recurring motifs such as spacious islands, white cabinets, copper pot racks and lots of marble. (A fan Instagram account called @nancymeyersinteriors has more than 33,000 followers!) During the pandemic, she reteamed with her Father of the Bride castmates for a 25-minute sequel, dubbed Part 3 (ish), which raised funds for World Central Kitchen. “I thought I was retired,” she wrote of the Zoom-produced project, in The New York Times. “After 40 years of making movies, I felt done. I was planning to travel more, start reading more. I wanted to buy a hammock. You know, all the regular stuff retired people want to do. Then COVID-19 came to America.” To deal with the anxiety and the boredom, she wrote and produced her newest film. “The pandemic,” she wrote, “brought me back to being a writer.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
Dec. 7: Basketball legend Larry Bird, 65
You might call Larry Bird, 65, the NBA’s ultimate triple threat. He’s the league’s first and only player to be named MVP, Coach of the Year and Executive of the Year. Not too shabby for a country boy who was given the nickname “The Hick From French Lick” for the rural Indiana town where he was raised. Born on Dec. 7, 1956, in the Hoosier State, Bird went on to play hoops at Indiana State University, where his team faced off in the 1979 NCAA championship game against the Michigan State Spartans and Magic Johnson, sparking one of the most fun-to-watch rivalries in the 1980s NBA. During his 13 seasons with the Boston Celtics, Bird earned a reputation as one of the league’s sharpest shooters, a hardworking and confident perfectionist who was known to practice three-pointers with his eyes shut. He ended his playing career on a high note, winning a gold medal at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona with the Dream Team, before announcing his retirement that August. Though he had no coaching experience, he became the head coach of the Indiana Pacers in 1997 before going on to be named the organization’s president of basketball operations and, later, a scout and consultant. This fall, the National Basketball Association included Bird — who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1998 — on its 75th Anniversary Team, a list of the 75 greatest players in league history. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
Dec. 6: Judd Apatow, 54
Martin Scorsese has his hotheaded mobsters, Mel Brooks has his crew. But Judd Apatow, 54, has dedicated his career to a host of less well-trodden cinematic types, including geeks, stoners, slackers and overgrown man-children. Born in New York on Dec. 6, 1967, Apatow got his start writing and producing for television shows like The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show, Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. From those early days, he began amassing a crew of regular collaborators, sometimes dubbed “Team Apatow,” who would come to populate the movies he later directed, such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People and This Is 40. Functioning almost like a repertory theater’s resident company, actors like Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Seth Rogen and many, many more rotate in and out of his projects. In 2020, he added a new member to the troupe when he cast Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson in The King of Staten Island, and next up, he’ll turn his directorial eye toward recent history with Netflix’s The Bubble, about a group of actors stuck in a hotel COVID bubble as they try to finish a film during the pandemic. Apatow also returned to stand-up in 2017 after a 25-year break, so keep an eye out for upcoming tour dates and appearances. In fact, he’ll be performing at the Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles tomorrow night! —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images
Dec. 5: Spanish tenor José Carreras, 75
In the 1996 Seinfeld episode “The Doll,” Spanish tenor José Carreras, 75, is repeatedly referred to as “the other guy” — in other words, the member of the Three Tenors who’s not Plácido Domingo or the late Luciano Pavarotti. It’s a joke, of course, but it’s also an unfair assessment of the impact of the Catalan tenor, who was one of the driving forces behind popularizing opera for 20th-century audiences. Born in Barcelona on Dec. 5, 1946, Carreras started singing opera as a child, and his parents enrolled him in a conservatory at age 7. He enjoyed a celebrated career, singing a repertoire that included Verdi and Puccini, until he was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 40. When he miraculously survived, he celebrated by performing with Pavarotti and Domingo at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, thus sparking the world-conquering trio of opera greats. Over the decades, he sold millions of records, solo and with the Three Tenors, and he retired from public singing in 2017 with a final world tour. Or so he said: Next year, he’ll return to the stage with a series of one-off concerts everywhere from Russia to Poland. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images
Dec. 4: Actor Jeff Bridges, 72
In her New Yorker review of The Last American Hero, the late film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Jeff Bridges, 72, that he “may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor who ever lived.” As his high-intensity thespian peers dabbled in Method acting, Bridges always seemed to just be, well, himself, the laid-back Angeleno who was born into a family of actors on Dec. 4, 1949. “He’s the most American — the loosest — of all the young actors, unencumbered by stage diction and the stiff, emasculated poses of most juveniles.” That lived-in authenticity and approachable charm has served him well over the years, whether he’s playing The Dude in The Big Lebowski, U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit or country singer Otis “Bad” Blake in Crazy Heart, for which he won the Academy Award for best actor. “Thank you, Mom and Dad, for turning me on to such a groovy profession,” he said, appropriately, in his acceptance speech. Last October, Bridges revealed that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma, and in a blog post on his website this September, he announced that he was in remission and that he had tested positive for and recovered from COVID-19, which he said “kicked [his] ass pretty good.” We can’t wait until he’s back on our screens in next year’s FX drama The Old Man, in which he plays a retired CIA officer who’s forced back into that world when he’s targeted for assassination. Perhaps a laid-back retired CIA officer? —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Taylor Miller/BuzzFeed News/Redux
Dec. 3: Actress Julianne Moore, 61
Last November, New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott placed Julianne Moore, 61, in the number 11 spot on their list of the 25 greatest actors of the 21st century. In describing her performance in Far from Heaven, Scott wrote, “She goes all the way in, staring out from the soul of a woman who is rooted in her time and absolutely modern, trapped by rules and appearances and also — terrifyingly and thrillingly — free.” You might say that Moore, who was born on Dec. 3, 1960, has made an entire career of going “all the way in.” For proof of her range, just take a look at the five women who earned her Oscar nominations: a 1970s pornographic actress in Boogie Nights, a woman having an affair in World War II England in The End of the Affair, a 1940s housewife whose life begins to fall apart in Far from Heaven, an unhappy ’50s homemaker in The Hours and a linguistics professor coping with a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice, which finally landed her a win for best actress. In each, she walks a tightrope between delicacy and strength, with a fragility and raw emotionality that has made her a favorite of American filmgoers. If she’s become known for playing mid-century women constricted by social mores, last year, she challenged that notion by playing Gloria Steinem in Julie Taymor’s The Glorias, and in 2021, she pulled double duty as a supportive mother in the Dear Evan Hansen film adaptation and as a woman grieving the loss of her husband in the Stephen King Apple TV+ miniseries Lisey’s Story. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Hudson River Park
Dec. 2: Actress Lucy Liu, 53
In 2019, Lucy Liu, 53, became only the second Asian American actress to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — 59 years after her predecessor, Anna May Wong. “Sometimes people talk about my mainstream successes as groundbreaking for an Asian, but Asians have been making movies for a long time,” Liu said at the event. “They just weren’t making them here because we weren’t yet invited to the table.” From the beginning of her career, Liu’s blazing talent has forced Hollywood to sit up and listen: After she didn’t get hired for a part on Ally McBeal, David E. Kelley created a new role specifically for Liu, for which she received an Emmy nomination. As Ling Woo, she skirted the line between hilarious and terrifying, and the actress — who was born in Queens on December 2, 1968 — cultivated a badass persona that served her well in films like Charlie’s Angels and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and on the television series Elementary, an updated Sherlock Holmes tale in which she costarred as surgeon–turned–sober companion–turned–detective Joan Watson. In addition to acting and directing, Liu is an accomplished visual artist, known for her erotically charged paintings and drawings, and she had her first museum show at the National Museum of Singapore in 2019. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Dec. 1: Actress/Singer Bette Midler, 76
Born in Honolulu on Dec. 1, 1945, Bette Midler, 76, first started amassing fans in the 1970s as a performer at a New York City gay bathhouse. She quickly developed her trademark campy persona, which combined brassy vocals, bawdy humor and bold costumes, and in 1972, she released her debut album, The Divine Miss M, coproduced by Barry Manilow. Over the years, she’s brought that outsized talent and signature sass to her Grammy-winning records and theater performances, even winning a special Tony Award in 1974 for “adding lustre to the Broadway season.” Midler’s film roles have run the gamut from raucous comedies (The First Wives Club) to all-time-great tearjerkers (Beaches), playing everyone from a fictionalized version of Janis Joplin in The Rose to real-life feminist and civil rights activist Bella Abzug in last year’s The Glorias. And she’s currently filming a sequel to the witchy family classic Hocus Pocus. But the New York theater always beckons Midler home: Nearly 50 years after her Broadway debut in Fiddler on the Roof in 1967, she starred as a legendary Hollywood talent agent in 2013’s I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers. And then, in 2017, she stepped into a role she was practically born to play: Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly!, for which she won a Tony and broke box office records. Most recently, you can catch her on two TV satires, as a chief of staff in Netflix’s The Politician and as a retired public school teacher on HBO’s quarantine-produced film, Coastal Elites, about the various ways we’ve coped with politics and the pandemic. Who else’s voice would you want to have guide you through a tough year? —Nicholas DeRenzo
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