← Fame through time1956
1956
Whose working lives fell in 1956. 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 1956, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh0 decades - 2
Charles Bronson5 decades - 3
Peter Ustinov8 decades - 4
Nancy Reagan4 decades - 5
Fahd of Saudi Arabia2 decades - 6
Suharto6 decades - 7
Stanisław Lem0 decades - 8
Yves Montand7 decades - 9
John Glenn10 decades - 10
Hua Guofeng7 decades - 11
Lana Turner8 decades - 12
Simone Signoret7 decades - 13
Jean-Bédel Bokassa6 decades - 14
Deborah Kerr8 decades - 15
Andrei Sakharov5 decades - 16
P. V. Narasimha Rao3 decades - 17
Michael I of Romania0 decades - 18
Gene Roddenberry4 decades - 19
Donna Reed8 decades - 20
Jane Russell8 decades - 21
Patricia Highsmith4 decades - 22
Rodney Dangerfieldnot measured- - 23
Fawzia Fuad of Egyptnot measured- - 24
Paulo Freire5 decades - 25
Sugar Ray Robinsonnot 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.