← Fame through time1950
1950
Whose working lives fell in 1950. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in 1950, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Frank Sinatra8 decades - 2
Édith Piaf6 decades - 3
Ingrid Bergman8 decades - 4
Orson Welles9 decades - 5
Augusto Pinochet5 decades - 6
Arthur Miller11 decades - 7
Billie Holiday8 decades - 8
Anthony Quinn7 decades - 9
Eli Wallach7 decades - 10
Moshe Dayan11 decades - 11
David Rockefeller7 decades - 12
Roland Barthes8 decades - 13
Stanley Matthews10 decades - 14
Alan Watts7 decades - 15
Hu Yaobangnot measured- - 16
Vasily Zaitsev8 decades - 17
Joachim Peipernot measured- - 18
Les Paul6 decades - 19
Yitzhak Shamir8 decades - 20
Saul Bellow7 decades - 21
Franz Josef Straußnot measured- - 22
Paul Tibbetsnot measured- - 23
Curd Jürgensnot measured- - 24
Thomas Mertonnot measured- - 25
Bob Kanenot measured-
How to read these rankings
- People sit in their own time. Everyone is placed in the century their working life belongs to, and never in one that came after their death.
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record, read across every language rather than one. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus. Those decades are closed, so each curve is measured once and kept.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, or a name belongs to more than one notable person, we would rather show nothing than guess.