January Celebrity Birthdays
A look at the famous and the fascinating on the day they were born
AARP Members Only Access, January 2022
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PHOTO BY: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
Jan. 31: Actress Minnie Driver, 52
The year 1997 was a very good one for British actress Minnie Driver, 52, who first burst onto the scene in America with back-to-back roles in Grosse Pointe Blank and Good Will Hunting. For the latter, in which she starred as a Harvard student who, as New York Times critic Janet Maslin put it, “can peer into Will’s soul as easily as she can tell a dirty joke,” Driver earned an Oscar nomination. Born on Jan.31, 1970, in London, Driver spent the next few years taking on juicy roles in projects like the Oscar Wilde adaptation An Ideal Husband and The Phantom of the Opera, in which she played the diva soprano Carlotta, and she even voiced an animated Disney heroine, Jane from Tarzan. But it was television where she really got to shine: On Will & Grace, she stole scenes as Karen’s rival-turned-stepdaughter Lorraine, and in 2007, she teamed up with Eddie Izzard to play Traveller con artists in the FX comedy The Riches. More recently, she showed off a slightly softer side as a mother who would do anything for her kids, including a nonverbal teen with cerebral palsy, on the ABC sitcom Speechless. Last year, she starred as Queen Beatrice in a new musical adaptation of Cinderella, which gave her the opportunity to show off her impressive pipes. (In addition to acting, Driver has also released three albums.) And, like many other celebrities during the pandemic, she launched a podcast, Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver. The concept is simple: She asks celebrities, politicians and other notable figures the same seven questions, including “When and where were you happiest?” and “What quality do you like least about yourself?” Her impressive guest list has already included Viola Davis, Tony Blair and Chelsea Clinton. “I feel like podcasts can be extraordinarily wayward, and I wanted to create something disciplined around a jumping-off point,” she told Variety. “It looks tame — but it’s pretty fierce.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Brian Rasic/WireImage/Getty Image
Jan. 30: Singer Phil Collins, 71
It’s hard to overstate just how massive a presence Phil Collins, 71, had on the radio in the 1980s and ’90s. During the ’80s alone, the eight-time Grammy winner racked up 14 Top 40 hits as a solo artist, plus five more as a member of Genesis and an extra bonus for “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Born in London on Jan. 30, 1951, Collins first came to prominence as the drummer of the progressive rock band Genesis, and he took over lead vocals when Peter Gabriel left the group in 1975. When the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, Trey Anastasio of Phish said, “Every musical rule and boundary was questioned and broken.” Collins brought that experimental edge to his solo work as well, including what many consider his signature song, “In the Air Tonight.” Rolling Stone placed it at No. 291 on its list of greatest songs of all time, calling it “an eerie synth-and-drum-machine moodscape, topped with an elliptical, accusatory rant and the Mona Lisa of all drum fills, a descending tom-tom break that Collins once likened to ‘barking seals.’” In 1999, Disney took a big chance, handing over the reins of the Tarzan soundtrack, and it was something totally unlike its predecessors; instead of having characters burst into song, Collins sang his own creations, and the gamble paid off. The album went double platinum, and “You’ll Be in My Heart” won an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Reunited with Genesis, Collins is heading back out on the road in the spring for a new leg of The Last Domino? Tour, which will take him through Europe. While a spinal injury has kept Collins mostly bound to a chair during sets and unable to play the drums, he has a worthy stand-in on the skins: his 20-year-old son, Nic. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Bruce Glikas/WireImage/ Getty Images
Jan. 29: Television Host Oprah Winfrey, 68
What more can be said about Lady O that hasn’t been said before? In her own way, Oprah Winfrey, 68, has had a more far-reaching and impactful career than any American entertainer since Walt Disney. Consider the facts: Born in Mississippi on Jan. 29, 1954, she worked her way up through the ranks as reporter and anchor until she eventually took over a failing local Chicago show and transformed it into her nationally syndicated talk powerhouse. The show — which was No. 1 for 24 seasons — won so many Daytime Emmy Awards (47, including seven for best host) that she eventually stopped submitting her name for consideration. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. She has also earned two Oscar nominations, for acting in The Color Purple and producing Selma, formed her own television production company, launched a magazine and her very OWN television network (pun intended) and reinvented reading itself when she introduced her on-air book club. Over the years, she was named a Kennedy Center honoree, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom and won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars and the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes. Following recent roles in 2017’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and 2018’s A Wrinkle in Time, Winfrey got back to her talk-show roots with the 2021 interview of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, which was seen by more than 49.1 million viewers worldwide in its first few days. Last spring, she cowrote the book What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing and released the Apple TV+ docuseries The Me You Can’t See, which she produced with Prince Harry. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Isaiah Trickey/Getty Images
Jan. 28: Singer Sarah McLachlan, 54
With her powerfully emotive voice and impressive vocal range, Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan, 54, has been challenging tear ducts to a standoff since she released her debut album, Touch, in 1988. Born in Halifax on Jan. 28, 1968, she had her biggest hit with 1997’s Surfacing, an album filled with radio-friendly singles, including “Adia,” “Sweet Surrender” and “Building a Mystery,” which earned her a Grammy for best female pop vocal performance. Surfacing also introduced American audiences to the song “Angel,” which would forever become associated with those heartbreaking ASPCA commercials. “I can’t watch them, it just kills me,” she later said. “I have to say, it was brutal doing those ads, because it was like ‘Can you just be a little more sad?’” But they did the trick, raising some $30 million for the ASPCA. In 1997, she cofounded the female-focused Lilith Fair, which over the span of three years pulled in $52 million, with $10 million going toward women’s charities. By 1999, McLachlan proved that “Angel” was far from the only time she would tug heartstrings: For Toy Story 2, she sang the Randy Newman–penned song “When She Loved Me,” which played over a scene where the toy cowgirl Jessie remembered her former owner who outgrew her. It’s one of the most devastating scenes ever in an animated film, and Tom Hanks and Tim Allen both admitted to weeping openly while watching it. The song ended up being nominated for an Oscar and winning a Grammy. Over the past two decades, McLachlan has steadily continued to release new music, including the 2016 holiday album Wonderland, and after a pandemic-induced hiatus, she’s set to return to live performances in a big way this June when she plays Washington state’s Gorge Amphitheatre alongside Brandi Carlile. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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Jan. 27: Actor Alan Cumming, 57
Scottish stage and screen actor Alan Cumming, 57, has an uncanny ability to melt into any genre he tries his hand at, from campy comedies (Spice World, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion) to Shakespearean classics (Titus), blockbuster superhero films (the X-Men franchise, in which he played Nightcrawler) to prestige legal dramas (The Good Wife). Born on Jan. 27, 1965, Cumming got his start as half of a cabaret double act, which perhaps prepared him for a life of triple threat-dom. In the ’90s, he gained international attention for his performance as Emcee in Sam Mendes’ 1993 West End revival of Cabaret; he brought the role to Broadway in 1998, winning a Tony for best actor, and returned to the Kit Kat Klub once again with a 2014 remounting at Studio 54. Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review that Cumming “commits grand theatrical larceny by commandeering a character that promised to be eternally the property of Joel Grey.” During the 2014 run, he ran a makeshift bar out of his Broadway dressing room, complete with its own neon sign, and he has since brought that energy down to the East Village, where he opened the nightclub and cabaret venue Club Cumming in 2017. Last year, he once again showed off his vocal chops as Mayor Aloysius Menlove in Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon!, a parody of 1940s musicals, and this spring, he heads back out on the road with two tune-filled shows, Och and Oy! A Considered Cabaret, with NPR’s Ari Shapiro, and Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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Jan. 26: Hockey Legend Wayne Gretzky, 61
When ESPN announced its list of the 100 greatest North American athletes of the 20th century in 1999, it placed Wayne Gretzky, 61, at No. 5, right between Jim Brown and Jesse Owens. Born in Brantford, Ontario, on Jan. 26, 1961, the hockey legend was unquestionably one of the most dominant players in the history of his — or any — sport, earning the nickname “The Great One.” Over the span of 20 years in the NHL, he won four Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers and was the only player to ever hit 200 points in a season, a feat he accomplished four times. In fact, of the highest-scoring seasons in league history, Gretzky has eight of the top 10 slots, with only Mario Lemieux coming close to his dominance. “It’s difficult to overstate Gretzky’s impact on the game,” E.M. Smith wrote in Sports Illustrated upon his retirement. “He is both hockey’s greatest scorer and its greatest ambassador. … He leaves the game with a mind-numbing 61 NHL records, many of which will never be broken.” Upon retirement, he was immediately inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame after the board of directors waived the traditional three-year waiting period, and he became the only player in history to have his jersey number, 99, retired league-wide. In recent years, he served as minority owner and head coach of the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes, and later became a partner in the Oilers. And in 2021, he joined Turner Sports as a studio analyst, which saw him looking at the game from a whole new point of view. “It’s kind of like being a rookie your first game,” he told The New York Times. “You don’t want to make any mistakes. So I just felt like I’m going to follow their lead, and I’m going to be the guy that kind of plays off of them.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Jerod Harris/FilmMagic/Getty Images
Jan. 25: Actress Jenifer Lewis, 65
If you don’t recognize the name of actress Jenifer Lewis, 65, you might find a clue in the title of her 2017 memoir: The Mother of Black Hollywood. Born in Missouri on Jan. 25, 1957, Lewis has been taking on maternal roles since the 1990s: She’s played the mother of Tupac Shakur (Poetic Justice), Whitney Houston (The Preacher’s Wife), Taraji P. Henson (Not Easily Broken) and Angela Bassett (What’s Love Got to Do With It), to name a few. In addition to acting, Lewis is an accomplished singer, having performed as one of Bette Midler’s Harlettes, on Broadway as Motormouth Maybelle in Hairspray and as the voice of voodoo priestess Mama Odie in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. In 2014, she began her most notable role to date as matriarch Ruby Johnson on the Emmy-winning ABC sitcom Black-ish. Ruby is a huge personality, a “mama bear” type who isn’t afraid to play dirty: To wit, she blew up her husband Earl’s (Laurence Fishburne) boat, shot him twice and stabbed him with a fork! But she always tries to lend her characters an air of authenticity. As she told Salon, “I try to play them with, yes, sass, but I give them warmth; I give my characters warmth and heart.” Next up, she’s set to star on the Showtime sitcom I Love This for You, opposite Saturday Night Live alums Molly Shannon and Vanessa Bayer, as the founder and CEO of a home-shopping network. The character has been described as “icy” and “enigmatic,” ensuring that the scene-stealing comedy legend will have a perfectly delicious role to sink her teeth into. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gabe Ginsberg/Getty Images
Jan. 24: Singer Neil Diamond, 81
As a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, Neil Diamond, 81, first got bitten by the music bug after seeing folk legend Pete Seeger play at his Jewish summer camp. Born on Jan. 24, 1941, he bought his first guitar at age 16 and later left NYU to become a songwriter at Sunbeam Music Company and then the Brill Building, which churned out such legends as Carole King and Paul Anka. After writing “I’m a Believer” for the Monkees, the future Grammy winner started recording his own songs, including radio hits like “Sweet Caroline” and “Cracklin’ Rosie.” In 1980, he made his acting debut in the critically panned remake of The Jazz Singer, getting nominated for both a Golden Globe Award for best actor and a Golden Raspberry Award for worst actor (he won the latter). The soundtrack proved to be a considerably bigger success, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard album charts and spawning three Top 10 singles, including “America.” An inductee in both the Rock & Roll and Songwriters’ halls of fame and a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2011, Diamond announced he was retiring from touring in 2018 after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; he has occasionally appeared on stage to sing live since then. In 2020, he released the album Classic Diamonds, on which he rerecorded 14 of his hits at Abbey Road Studios alongside the London Symphony Orchestra. “In a strange way, I think I’m singing better than ever,” he told Parade. “It’s probably because I’m not on the road singing full-out and tearing up my voice. So it’s in very good shape, which I didn’t expect.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Maarten de Boer/NBCUniversal/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Jan. 23: Actress Mariska Hargitay, 58
The week that Mariska Hargitay, 58, started playing Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in September 1999, Bill Clinton was president, TLC was on the top of the charts and The Sixth Sense was the biggest movie in America. Much has changed since then, but Hargitay remains a constant — and still exceedingly popular — presence on the small screen. Born on Jan. 23, 1964, to “blonde bombshell” Jayne Mansfield and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay, Mariska cycled through a slew of unmemorable roles in forgettable ’80s flicks like Ghoulies and Jocks, before a recurring turn on ER helped her land the first Law & Order spinoff. In SVU’s 23 seasons (and counting), Hargitay has picked up an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and she recently broke a record for playing the longest-running live-action character in primetime TV history, surpassing James Arness and Milburn Stone from Gunsmoke and Kelsey Grammer from Cheers and Frasier. She’s become an indelible pop culture icon in the process: “Mariska Hargitay,” for instance, was used as a catchphrase by the Indian guru in the Mike Myers comedy The Love Guru (in which she made a cameo), and Taylor Swift famously named her cat Olivia Benson and cast Hargitay in her “Bad Blood” music video. Last year, Hargitay pulled double duty, crossing over to the new Law & Order spinoff, Organized Crime, which saw her reteaming with her original SVU partner Elliot Stabler, played by Christopher Meloni. Outside of the world of L&O, Hargitay founded the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004, which is dedicated to changing societal responses to sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse, with such initiatives as ending the rape kit backlog and supporting survivors’ healing. We know Olivia Benson would approve. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Lars Niki/E! Entertainment/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Jan. 22: Celebrity Restaurateur Guy Fieri, 54
Viewers often like to razz Guy Fieri, 54, for his raucous party boy demeanor, his spiky bleached hair, his flame-covered bowling shirts and the sunglasses he wears on the back of his head. But the wildly popular Food Network personality — who was born on Jan. 22, 1968 — has been working hard for everything he’s gotten since childhood. At the age of 10, he began selling soft pretzels from a bicycle cart and washing dishes, and after six years used the money to go to culinary school in France. “My parents were into macrobiotic cooking — vegetarian, nondairy, whole grains, no red meat,” he told People magazine. “I started cooking when I was 10 because I just couldn’t eat that stuff.” By the ’90s, he launched his first restaurant, Johnny Garlic’s, in Santa Rosa, California, and later followed it up with a BBQ-meets-sushi spot called Tex Wasabi’s that perfectly captured his reputation (for better or worse) as a culinary rule-breaker. In 2006, he got his big break when he won the reality competition The Next Food Network Star and was rewarded with his own show, Guy’s Big Bite. Soon, his face was all over the channel, as he earned Emmy nominations for his travel show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives and hosted the competition show Guy’s Grocery Games among dozens of other series and specials. Julia Moskin wrote in The New York Times that he “brought a new element of rowdy, mass-market culture to American food television,” and he’s used his ubiquity to launch a winery, a tequila brand and dozens of restaurants. Under all that bravado, the “Mayor of Flavortown” is — as he might put it — a really good dude: During the pandemic, he raised $25 million for restaurant relief, offering $500 grants to 43,000 restaurants workers across the country, nearly 60 percent of whom are women and 50 percent of whom are people of color. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Gareth Cattermole/Contour by Getty Images
Jan. 21: Actress Geena Davis, 66
A member of Mensa, a former Victoria’s Secret model and an almost-Olympian, actress Geena Davis, 66, has bucked expectations throughout her career. Born on Jan. 21, 1956, she made her screen debut in 1982’s Tootsie and then appeared in a string of hits that included The Fly, Beetlejuice and The Accidental Tourist, for which she won the best supporting actress Oscar in 1989. By the 1990s, Davis was pursuing roles that pushed forth the idea of female empowerment, whether that meant playing a bullied housewife reclaiming her narrative in Thelma & Louise, a pioneering baseball player in A League of Their Own or a pirate queen in Cutthroat Island. It was around this time that Davis became fascinated with archery and took up the sport at the age of 41. But this was no passing fancy: She later placed 24th out of 300 Olympic hopefuls, just missing out on a spot on the U.S. team at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. In 2004, she launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, the industry’s only research-based organization dedicated to studying and promoting balance and inclusion in entertainment; initiatives have included founding the Bentonville Film Festival, in Arkansas, which celebrates diverse filmmakers, and producing the 2019 documentary This Changes Everything about the underrepresentation of women in the industry. And she continues to put her money where her mouth is when it comes to taking roles: She won the 2006 Golden Globe for best actress for playing the first female president in the TV series Commander in Chief. In 2019, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Davis with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her efforts. “There’s one category of gross gender inequality where the underrepresentation can change overnight: on-screen,” she said in her acceptance speech. “Let’s make this change happen right now.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Celebrity Fight Night
Jan. 20: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, 92
It’s not often that a person who was the second to do something historic gets remembered, but alas, Buzz Aldrin, 92, is no ordinary man. Born Jan. 20, 1930, in Montclair, New Jersey, Aldrin graduated third in his class at West Point and went on to fly fighter jets during the Korean War. After serving in West Germany, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation was manned orbital rendezvous. In 1963, he was recruited by NASA and became the first astronaut with a doctorate, leading to the nickname “Dr. Rendezvous.” Three years later, he was changing history by performing the first successful spacewalk — and, as he likes to point out on his website, taking the first selfie in space! — on the Gemini 12 orbital mission. And then, in July 1969, Aldrin reached new heights when he became the second person to step foot on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission, following closely after Neil Armstrong in front of a TV audience of some 600 million earthlings. “I sometimes think the three of us missed ‘the big event,’” he said in 2019, during a 50th anniversary celebration. “While we were out there on the moon, the world was growing closer together, right here.” Upon returning to Earth, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and since retiring from NASA in 1971, he has written biographies and children’s books, advocated for a mission to Mars, walked in a New York Fashion Week runway show and even become the oldest explorer, at age 86, to reach the South Pole. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic
Jan. 19: Actress Katey Sagal, 68
Katey Sagal, 68, was destined to be a performer: She was born in Hollywood on Jan. 19, 1954, to a director father and singer mother — and her godfather is none other than Norman Lear. Before she became an award-winning TV powerhouse, it looked like she might find stardom in the music industry instead. After getting her start as a singing waitress, Sagal sang backup for the likes of Etta James and Bob Dylan and was even hired as one of Bette Midler’s backing trio, the Harlettes. But most Americans will remember her from her breakthrough role as Peg Bundy, the loud-dressing, red-bouffanted housewife from Married … With Children. While she was often written off as a white-trash cliché, in 2018 Washington Post critic Abbey Bender wrote that “Peg Bundy, with her acid tongue and commitment to glamor in the face of adversity, has proved to be the true queen of the ’90s working-class sitcom.” Since the series ended in 1997, Sagal has showed off her impressive range with a series of wildly different TV roles: voicing a one-eyed mutant on the animated hit Futurama, starring as sitcom matriarch Cate Hennessy on 8 Simple Rules (and keeping the ship afloat when her TV husband John Ritter died in real life) and going full baddie as Gemma Teller Morrow on the motorcycle gang drama Sons of Anarchy, for which she won a Golden Globe — not to mention memorable cameos and multi-episode arcs on everything from Lost and Shameless to Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Big Bang Theory. Last year, she starred in the ABC legal drama Rebel, inspired by the life of Erin Brockovich, and while the series was unfortunately canceled after only a few episodes, she already had another gig lined up on the network: She plays Dan Conner’s new wife, Louise Goldufski, in the post-Roseanne Roseanne follow-up The Conners. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Robby Klein/Contour by Getty Images
Jan. 18: Actor Kevin Costner, 67
Kevin Costner, 67, has starred as baseball players (Bull Durham, Field of Dreams), golfers (Tin Cup), historic crime fighters (The Untouchables), outlaws (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) and post-apocalyptic heroes (Waterworld). But he’s always managed to find his way back to the Western. Born on Jan. 18, 1955, Costner has credited How the West Was Won with shaping his future career path; after seeing the film at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles at the age of 7, he built three canoes, and spent the years after high school paddling down the same rivers as Lewis and Clark. In 1990, he got to put his love of the genre on full display with the acclaimed film Dances with Wolves, in which he plays a Union Army lieutenant who befriends a group of Lakota. He won Oscars for best director and best film, and because of his sympathetic portrayal of Native American characters, he was even adopted as an honorary member of the Sioux Nation. Over the years, he returned to the Western with 1994’s Wyatt Earp and 2003’s Open Range, and he won an Emmy for the 2012 History Channel miniseries Hatfields & McCoys. These days, he’s tackling the genre in a 21st-century setting with the hit Paramount Network series Yellowstone, in which he stars as John Dutton, who runs a Montana cattle ranch as large as Rhode Island. Costner, who recently finished up the drama’s fourth season, was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers in 2019. “I love making Westerns,” he said during the ceremony. “I know who I am more than any other time in my life when I’m making ’em. I understand their importance to our culture and the emotional impact, when done correctly, on men, on women and 7-year-olds.” When he’s not acting, Costner is usually performing with his band, called — what else? — Kevin Costner & Modern West. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: NAACP via Getty Images
Jan. 17: Former First Lady Michelle Obama, 58
In December, former First Lady Michelle Obama, 58, was voted the world’s most admired woman in a YouGov international poll — a feat she also pulled off in 2020 and 2019. Born in Chicago on Jan. 17, 1964, the recent inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame has been impressive from the start, attending Princeton and then Harvard Law School before working as an attorney at Chicago firm Sidley & Austin. (It was here that she met an upstart summer associate named Barack.) Later, as America’s first Black first lady, she started the Let’s Move! initiative, which was aimed at ending childhood obesity within a generation; she planted a garden on the White House South Lawn, and fruits and vegetables were served inside or donated to area food banks. Much like her husband, Michelle is known for her way with words, as evidenced by her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, which immediately launched her phrase “when they go low, we go high” into the American lexicon. In 2018, she released her autobiography Becoming, which went on to become the highest-selling book of the year, earned her a Grammy for its audiobook and spawned a Netflix documentary about her star-studded book tour. The latter is part of an ongoing production deal between the Obamas and the streaming giant that will see them produce documentaries, feature films, sketch comedy and animated kids series. Among their biggest successes so far is Waffles + Mochi, a children’s cooking show in which she stars as the owner of a magical grocery store. “She is always going to be the former first lady to the parents in the audience, who may have trouble adjusting to her new identity as a children’s-edutainment superstar,” wrote Helen Rosner in The New Yorker. “But for the kids who grow up watching Waffles + Mochi on Netflix, maybe she’ll just be Mrs. O., the nice lady from TV who tends a rooftop garden set above a puppet-filled grocery store.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Jan. 16: Singer Sade, 63
Armed with one of the most instantly recognizable and impossibly smooth voices in music history, Sade burst onto the charts in 1984 after studying fashion and then working as a backup singer. Born in Nigeria on January 16, 1959 and raised in England, Helen Folasade Adu scribbled down her first song on the back of a bill, as she was walking home in the rain, but it didn’t take long for her and her eponymous band Sade to hit it big. Their debut album, Diamond Life, which featured hits like “Your Love is King” and “Smooth Operator,” helped earn her a best new artist Grammy. With an ever-evolving sophisti-pop sound that drew on R&B, jazz, soul, funk and even Afro-Cuban influences, she released hit record after hit record, including 1985’s Promise, which yielded the single “The Sweetest Taboo,” and 1992’s Love Deluxe. Following a hiatus, the band came roaring back, cool as ever, with the 2000 album Lovers Rock, a Grammy winner for best pop vocal album. In 2002, Queen Elizabeth II named Sade an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, which she called “a great gesture to me and all Black women in England,” and she was upgraded to Commander status in 2017. Since its Grammy-winning 2010 album Soldier of Love, the band has released only two new songs, both from soundtracks: “Flower of the Universe” from A Wrinkle in Time and “The Big Unknown” from Widows. According to a 2020 British GQ article, they’re working on a new album, recording music at her house in Gloucestershire. Will it be a hit? As she told The New York Times in 2010, “If you’re only making an album every 10 years, it better be good.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Jan. 15: Actress Regina King, 51
Regina King, 51, has been acting steadily since the 1980s, when she was cast at age 14 to play Brenda on the NBC sitcom 227. Born in LA on January 15, 1971, King has stolen scenes in such films as Friday, Jerry Maguire and Ray, but few of those supporting roles lived up to her blazing talent. Things started to turn around when she starred in the gripping (if underrated) police drama Southland for five seasons, which led to further TV gigs on Shameless and The Leftovers. In 2015, she started a three-season run on the anthology series American Crime, for which she earned back-to-back Emmys. She picked up two more, in 2018 for the miniseries Seven Seconds and then in 2020 for the HBO superhero limited series Watchmen. With her quartet of statues, she tied Alfre Woodard for the most acting Emmys of any Black performer. King also reigned supreme on the big screen, picking up a 2019 best supporting actress Oscar win for If Beale Street Could Talk. “Honestly, I was never an actress because I wanted to win awards,” she told The Observer during awards season. “Or ever looking to be the first Black woman to win this or that. I just love the electricity when a performance feels special. Not every performance feels like that, but I have been lucky to have a few.” In 2020, she directed the critically acclaimed historical drama One Night in Miami…, about an imagined meeting between Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Cassius Clay, and she became only the second Black woman to be nominated for best director at the Golden Globes. After her performance as the outlaw Treacherous Trudy in last year’s Western The Harder They Fall, King will next star as the first Black congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm. “[Her] fearless determination has been an inspiration to so many of us,” King said, “and with this film we hope to inspire many generations to come.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP Photo
Jan. 14: Director Steven Soderbergh, 59
Like a bolt out of the blue, director Steven Soderbergh, 59, burst onto the scene with 1989’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, earning the Palme d’Or at Cannes — and then his career sputtered for almost a decade, with a string of quirky, strange and ultra-niche films. Born in Atlanta on January 14, 1963, Soderbergh finally recaptured the magic with 1998’s sexy-cool Out of Sight, a heist film starring Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney, that kicked off a string of critically acclaimed box-office hits. In 2001, he became only the third person to be nominated for best director twice in the same year, for Erin Brockovich and Traffic, winning for the latter. Following his star-studded Ocean’s Eleven series, he balanced experimental passion projects (including a four-and-a-half-hour Che Guevara biopic) with crowd-pleasers like Contagion and Magic Mike. And then, in 2013, he claimed that he was retiring from making movies, focusing instead on the period TV drama The Knick. “I’m not going to stop making things,” he said at the time. “I just need to come at it from a different direction… I need to tear it all down and start again.” His sabbatical proved short-lived: Following the 2017 NASCAR heist comedy Logan Lucky and the interactive app-based drama Mosaic, Soderbergh has churned out film after film after film, including the basketball drama High Flying Bird, the Panama Papers comedy The Laundromat, the cruise-ship-set Let Them All Talk and last year’s No Sudden Move, about crooks in 1950s Detroit. This February, he’ll release Kimi, a pandemic-shot thriller starring Zoë Kravitz as an agoraphobic tech worker, followed up next by Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the threequel to his male-stripper magnum opus. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Steven Ferdman/Getty Images
Jan. 13: Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, 61
Elaine Benes is such a generation-defining comedic creation that, even two decades after the end of Seinfeld, it’s still impossible to see someone dancing poorly at a wedding without thinking of her “full-body dry heave set to music.” Born on January 13, 1961, Louis-Dreyfus joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1982 at the age of 21. Though she would later say that her years at SNL were marked by sexism and dog-eat-dog competitiveness, the show afforded her the opportunity to meet then-writer Larry David, who would cast her on the career-making Seinfeld in 1990; as Jerry’s ex-girlfriend Elaine, she picked up her first Emmy, a feat she’d repeat in 2006 with the sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine. But she truly reached her full comedic potential playing the unethical, foulmouthed and utterly hilarious Vice President (and later President) Selina Meyer on HBO’s Veep. She bagged an unprecedented six consecutive Emmys for the role, tying Cloris Leachman for the most wins for a performer — an accomplishment made all the more impressive considering that she was dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis between filming seasons. After finishing Veep, the 2018 winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor recently signed a production deal with Apple TV+, and she shocked audiences last year when she showed up in the most unexpected of places: as the darkly comedic villain Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in Marvel’s TV show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and later the Black Widow film, with more MCU appearances on the way. As Elaine might say, “GET OUT!” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Kyodo via AP Photo
Jan. 12: Writer Haruki Murakami, 73
Trying to pin down Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, 73, is a fool’s errand. For proof, just take a look at his influences and favorite writers, which run the gamut from Raymond Chandler and Kurt Vonnegut to Franz Kafka and Stephen King. Born in Kyoto on January 12, 1949, Murakami got into writing after an epiphany at a baseball game in 1978. He later recalled: “In that instant, for no reason and on no grounds whatsoever, the thought suddenly struck me: I think I can write a novel.” After the success of his 1979 debut, Hear the Wind Sing, Murakami began experimenting with literary genres, drawing liberally from fantasy, sci-fi, horror, noir and magical realism to create a form that’s uniquely his own. Standouts include the coming-of-age novel Norwegian Wood, the surrealist (and nearly 1,000-page) 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a nightmarish story that’s at once about a man looking for a missing cat and an examination of guilt and identity in postwar Japan. Most recently, he released the 2020 short story collection First Person Singular. “The eight stories… are classic Murakami,” wrote NPR critic Heller McAlpin, “filled with multiple recurrent obsessions — jazz, classical music, Beatles, baseball, and memories of perplexing young love. Cats are scarce, but a sophisticated talking monkey fills the feline gap.” Over the years, Murakami’s works have been adapted into stage plays, video games and films, including 2021’s Drive My Car, about an aging actor’s relationship with his 20-year-old female chauffeur. A favorite for the 2020 best foreign film Oscar, it has already picked up best picture wins from a number of critics’ groups. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images
Jan. 11: Performer Mary J. Blige, 51
Long hailed as the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, Mary J. Blige, 51, has more than lived up to her regal reputation since the release of her solo debut, What's the 411?, which turns 30 this year. With an exceedingly expressive voice that’s able to convey pain and love and triumph, Blige — who was born in the Bronx on January 11, 1971 — has dominated in a genre and an industry that has often felt like a boys’ club. Over the years, she’s picked up nine Grammy wins, and Rolling Stone included her at number 100 on their greatest singers of all time list, with Sting calling her “the true heir to Aretha Franklin.” Based on the drama and character in her vocal arrangements, it’s probably unsurprising that she has excelled in recent years as an actress as well. For her role as a sharecropper’s wife in the 2017 historical drama Mudbound, she earned two Oscar nominations, for best supporting actress and best original song — marking the first time a performer has received both accolades in the same year. Last year, she pulled double duty, playing two very different parts: jazz legend Dinah Washington in the Aretha biopic Respect and as ruthless drug queenpin Monet Tejada in the Starz drama Power Book II: Ghost. But her most compelling role of 2021 may have been herself: The notoriously private icon opened up about her abusive childhood and her creative process in the revealing and intimate Prime Video documentary Mary J. Blige’s My Life. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Mike Marsland/WireImage/Getty Images
Jan. 10: Singer Rod Stewart, 77
Believe it or not, last year marked the 50th anniversary of Rod Stewart’s landmark album Every Picture Tells a Story and its chart-topping single “Maggie May.” Born in London on January 10, 1945, the raspy-voiced singer cycled through bands both obscure (Steampacket, Shotgun Express) and legendary (the Jeff Beck Group, the Faces) before hitting it big as a solo artist, with such singles as “You Wear It Well,” “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)” and the slinky, disco-tinged “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” In 1994, Stewart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, and he was later included in the 2012 class for his work with the Faces — but, in a fluke twist, he was unable to attend both times, thanks to the L.A. earthquake (’94) and a bout of strep throat (’12). In 2002, Stewart began a decade-long project, in which he recorded traditional pop standards, and while the albums didn’t often connect with critics, they garnered enormous fan response: It Had to Be You: The Great American Songbook, for instance, went triple platinum. Since 2011, Stewart has been a fixture in Las Vegas, where his residency at Caesars Palace has raked in tens of millions of dollars, and it will continue going strong into 2022, with at least nine new dates announced between May and October. And he may have a few new songs to add to his hit-filled repertoire: In November, he released his 31st studio album, The Tears of Hercules. “I’ve never said this before about any previous efforts,” he said of his new songs, “but I believe this is by far my best album in many a year.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Rich Fury/Getty Images
Jan. 9: Singer Joan Baez, 81
A pioneering voice of the 1960s folk movement, Joan Baez, 81, got her musical start playing in coffeehouses at the age of 17. Born on Jan. 9, 1941, to Quaker activists, she used her “achingly pure soprano” — as her voice was described by a music critic at the time — to reinterpret traditional folk ballads and the works of her onetime boyfriend Bob Dylan, before branching out with her own songs, such as “Diamonds and Rust.” Throughout her career, the “Queen of Folk” lent her voice to important causes of the day, from the civil rights movement to anti–Vietnam War protests, and she was even in Hanoi to deliver Christmas gifts and mail to American POWs when the U.S. bombed the city. That urge to fight for justice hasn’t diminished over the years, and she’s recently kept the tradition alive by performing at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation as well the Women’s March. For her influence on music, Baez was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. “What has given my life deep meaning and unending pleasure has been to use my voice in the battle against injustice,” she said in her moving speech at the induction ceremony. “It has brought me in touch with my own purpose.” In March 2018, Baez released her first new studio album in a decade, Whistle Down the Wind, which went on to be nominated for best folk album at the Grammys. Last year, she was also celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors, and her friend Jackson Browne summed up Baez’s power: “To track Joan’s involvement in human rights and social justice is to chart the evolution of our own moral awakening. Her example has been, from the beginning, one of empowerment.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Mike Pont/WireImage/Getty Images
Jan. 8: Designer Carolina Herrera, 83
One of the most recognizable names in 20th-century fashion, Carolina Herrera was born in Venezuela on Jan. 8, 1939, the daughter of a prominent politician who served as the governor of Caracas and the minister of foreign affairs. Never formally trained in fashion (she preferred tennis and horses to sewing), she got her start working as a publicist for Emilio Pucci, and upon moving to New York City, she quickly became a fixture at Studio 54. (One night, while at the infamous nightclub, she even traded Andy Warhol her bejeweled clutch for a silk screen portrait!) Vogue Editor-in-Chief Diana Vreeland encouraged her to start designing clothes, and in 1981, Herrera presented her first collection at New York’s Metropolitan Club. “I have a responsibility to the woman of today,” she has said about her designing philosophy, “to make her feel confident, modern and, above all else, beautiful.” Her signature personal look is a crisp white blouse paired with a full ball skirt, and her creations have always skewed elegant, feminine and timeless. Over the course of her decades-long career, the 2008 Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award winner has dressed everyone from Jackie Onassis to Michelle Obama, and she even designed Bella Swan’s wedding gown in the Twilight film franchise. In 2018, she stepped down from her namesake fashion house after 37 years as creative director, entering a new role as global brand ambassador. “Just don’t say I am retiring,” she told The New York Times. “I am not retiring! I am moving forward.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Jan. 7: Journalist Katie Couric, 65
When Katie Couric, 65, officially took over the Today host chair in 1991, critics threw around words like “perky” and “America’s sweetheart” and “girl next door.” But that dismissive and somewhat sexist assessment belied the trailblazing career that was to follow. Born on Jan. 7, 1957, in Arlington, Virginia, Couric quickly helped Today skyrocket in the ratings, and the NBC morning juggernaut enjoyed a number of years at the top. While at NBC, she also moonlighted on Dateline NBC, on a series on colon cancer (the disease that killed her husband), which involved her getting an on-screen colonoscopy. In 2001, she won a Peabody Award for her work on the Today Show and, in 2006, when her contract ended, she made the switch to CBS, where she became the first solo female anchor of a evening news broadcast. She later went on to become a correspondent for ABC News, before hosting her own syndicated daytime show called Katie for two years and then serving as “global news anchor” at Yahoo! News. Last year, she made a splash once again with the release of her tell-all memoir, Going There, in which she dives deep on sexism in the media, her eating disorder and her relationship with disgraced former cohost Matt Lauer. “On TV, you are larger than life but somehow smaller, too, a neatly cropped version of who you are,” she writes. “Real life — the complications and contradictions, the messy parts — remains outside the frame. It’s magical, television; I know it made my dreams come true. But it is not the whole story, and it is not the whole me. This book is.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Andrew Eccles/CBS via Getty Images
Jan. 6: TV Star Julie Chen Moonves, 52
Equally adept at hosting a reality competition, reporting the news or moderating a daytime chat show, Julie Chen Moonves, 52, has never gotten the credit she deserves for the versatility she’s displayed during her more than two decades at CBS — which is made even more impressive considering that she’s done it all as one of the few Asian American women in her field. Born on Jan. 6, 1970, in Queens, New York, Chen Moonves faced discrimination early in her broadcasting career: She revealed in 2013 that her boss at a Dayton, Ohio, news station told her that her “Asian eyes” would hurt her career, and an agent suggested “double eyelid” surgery, a cosmetic procedure which she has since been very open about having done. In addition to her work as an anchor on CBS Morning News and The Early Show, Chen Moonves has hosted 23 seasons of Big Brother — which is a bit like Survivor set in a house on a studio back lot — since 2000, plus its spin-off Celebrity Big Brother, which returns for its third season in February. In 2010, she helped launch The Talk, a female-focused daytime show that was CBS’ answer to The View, and she served as its cohost and moderator for eight seasons; she left the show in 2018, when her husband, CBS CEO Les Moonves, stepped down after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced, and it was during that time that she began publicly using his last name. That year, she also released her first children’s book, When I Grow Up, in which a young boy rattles off to his mother all the things he might be when he becomes an adult: a mountain climber, a mayor, a painter … and we’re sure the host-journalist-writer-producer can relate! —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Tara Ziemba/WireImage/Getty Images
Jan. 5: Actor Robert Duvall, 91
With all the accolades Robert Duvall, 91, has accumulated over the years, you might have forgotten that much of his career has been spent playing parts that were far from top-billed. In fact, in 1977, People magazine called him “Hollywood’s No. 1 No. 2 lead,” for his ability to make a meal out of even the smallest roles. Born in San Diego on Jan. 5, 1931, Duvall — whom critic Elaine Mancini called “the most technically proficient, the most versatile and the most convincing actor on the screen in the United States” — racked up a string of acclaimed supporting roles in the 1960s and ’70s, including the reclusive Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, surgeon Maj. Frank Burns in M*A*S*H and Mafia attorney Tom Hagen in the Godfather films. In 1979, his Apocalypse Now character, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, delivered the infamous line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” which went on to be ranked No. 12 on the American Film Institute list of great movie quotes. He took top billing with 1979’s The Great Santini, in which he played a Marine pilot, and he eventually won an Oscar for best actor in 1984 for playing down-on-his-luck country singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies. Over the years, he’s starred as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Joseph Pulitzer, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Eichmann and Robert E. Lee, and he’s still going strong in his 90s: In 2021, he made a cameo in the Depression-era football drama 12 Mighty Orphans, and he’ll next appear in the Netflix basketball comedy Hustle, opposite Adam Sandler and Queen Latifah. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP Photo
Jan. 4: Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, 79
One of America’s foremost history experts, Doris Kearns Goodwin, 79, has become a go-to guest on shows like Meet the Press and The Daily Show, thanks to her unique ability to contextualize whatever we’re going through as a nation. After serving as a White House fellow during the Johnson administration, she helped LBJ draft his memoirs, and she later mined their relationship for her first book, 1976’s Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Around the same time, the lifelong baseball fan, who was born on Jan. 4, 1943, became the first female journalist to report from the Boston Red Sox locker room. Best known for her presidential biographies, she won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1995 for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, and her 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln was adapted into Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning biopic Lincoln. She continued her presidential project with her latest book, 2018’s Leadership in Turbulent Times, an in-depth analysis of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. “Somehow men are more willing to just somehow say early on, ‘I’m a leader,’” she told The Guardian upon its publication. “Women will take responsibility for things, and that is a mark of leadership, and it has to be recognized that they should say that’s what makes me a leader. I think it’s going to happen, but I hope it’s not 200 years from now before some historian is writing about four women.” Most recently, Goodwin has turned her attention to television, producing the 2020 History Channel miniseries Washington, with follow-ups on Abe and Teddy in the works, and if you want to learn from the woman New York magazine called “America’s historian-in-chief” yourself, you can now listen to her lectures on presidential history and leadership on MasterClass. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Jan. 3: Singer Stephen Stills, 77
Hailed as a “musical genius” by his former bandmate Neil Young, singer-songwriter Stephen Stills, 77, was the only performer to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice on the same night, when in 1997 he was honored with both Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Born on Jan. 3, 1945, in Dallas, Stills crammed an entire career’s worth of success into two short years with Buffalo Springfield (1966-68), including the release of several albums and classic songs like the protest anthem “For What It’s Worth.” He found a longer-term partnership that year, when he began collaborating with David Crosby and Graham Nash — with Neil Young occasionally dropping in for good measure. And yet, despite his place of pride in rock history, he has always remained a bit under the radar. In its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, Rolling Stone placed him at No. 47: “Stills is one of rock’s most underrated guitarists, possibly because of his well-established reputation as a singer-songwriter. Off and on for more than four decades, he has challenged and complemented Young’s feral breaks with a Latin- and country-inflected chime, and as his soaring solos at the recent Buffalo Springfield reunion shows have illustrated, Stills has never lost his fervor for adventurous shredding.” In August 2020, Stills and Broadway actor Billy Porter closed out the first night of the Democratic National Convention with a new rendition of “For What It’s Worth,” with proceeds from the sale of the song going to Michelle Obama’s nonprofit, When We All Vote. Later that year, he launched InStill Change, a platform and merchandise shop dedicated to helping a new generation of activists. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Rich Fury/Getty Images for dcp
Jan. 2: Actress Renée Elise Goldsberry, 51
Most Americans know Renée Elise Goldsberry, 51, from her superstar-making turn as Angelica Schuyler in the Broadway smash Hamilton, in which she brings down the house with her lightning-fast rapping on the song “Satisfied.” “The lyrics to ‘Satisfied’... are some of the most intricate I’ve ever written,” Lin-Manuel Miranda told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “I can’t even rap them, but Renée Elise Goldsberry, who plays Angelica — that’s her conversational speed. That’s how fast she thinks.” The role earned her a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy nomination for the filmed Disney+ version of the musical. Born on January 2, 1971, Goldsberry got her start as attorney Evangeline Williamson on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, and her pre-Hamilton stage career included some of the most iconic Broadway roles of the past two decades — Mimi in Rent, Nala in The Lion King and Nettie in The Color Purple. While her career will now forever be defined by Angelica, Goldsberry is anything but a one-hit wonder. Case in point: This year, she starred in the Tina Fey–produced sitcom Girls5eva (which will return for a second season in 2022) about a ’90s girl group staging a comeback in their 40s, two decades after their lone radio hit. As Alexis Soloski wrote in The New York Times, “As Wickie, ‘the fierce one,’ Goldsberry gets to sing, dance and display a knack for lunatic comedy. She fakes a fempire, crab walks into a Duane Reade, pilots a motorized bed, seduces a young influencer and shoots geese off an airport runway.” And, oh yeah, she of course brings her powerhouse vocals to the role. —Nicholas DeRenzo
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PHOTO BY: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP Photo
Jan. 1: Actor Frank Langella, 84
Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on January 1, 1938, stage and screen legend Frank Langella, 84, worked hard to lose his accent. “As a teenager, I had worshipped John Gielgud’s voice and manner and his clear, precise, intelligent delivery of Shakespeare,” he wrote in his 2012 memoir Dropped Names. “So much so that I locked myself in the attic of my family house in New Jersey and listened to him deliver Clarence’s speech from Richard III dozens of times on the recording of the 1955 Laurence Olivier film in order to eliminate the Joisey in me.” It was that speech that eventually got him into the training program at the Lincoln Center Repertory Company, kicking off a decades-long Broadway career that would eventually lead to four Tony Awards, including best actor wins for 2007’s Frost/Nixon (he also got an Oscar nomination playing President Nixon in the film adaptation ) and 2016’s The Father. Langella’s recent screen work included two seasons as a children’s television producer on the Showtime dramedy Kidding, and last year, his role as Judge Julius Hoffman in The Trial of the Chicago 7 earned him a shared Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast. Next up, Langella is set to appear in a pair of literary adaptations: as a retired writer who lives with a talking dog (voiced by Cheech Marin) in Lapham Rising, based on Roger Rosenblatt’s 2006 novel; and as patriarch Roderick Usher in Netflix’s miniseries adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
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