← Fame through time1955
1955
Whose working lives fell in 1955. 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 1955, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Pope John Paul II5 decades - 2
Isaac Asimov7 decades - 3
James Dean9 decades - 4
Federico Fellini8 decades - 5
Toshiro Mifune5 decades - 6
Ray Bradbury7 decades - 7
Charles Bukowski5 decades - 8
Frank Herbert10 decades - 9
Yul Brynner7 decades - 10
Mickey Rooney9 decades - 11
Ravi Shankar6 decades - 12
Montgomery Clift8 decades - 13
Rosalind Franklin4 decades - 14
Walter Matthau6 decades - 15
Mario Puzo5 decades - 16
Shelley Winters7 decades - 17
Farouk of Egypt2 decades - 18
Timothy Leary6 decades - 19
Charlie Parker7 decades - 20
Maureen O'Hara8 decades - 21
Clarice Lispector4 decades - 22
Gene Tierney8 decades - 23
Alberto Sordi7 decades - 24
Richard von Weizsäcker5 decades - 25
Sergei Bondarchuk6 decades
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.