← Fame through time1961
1961
Whose working lives fell in 1961. 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 1961, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Elizabeth II8 decades - 2
Marilyn Monroe7 decades - 3
Fidel Castro10 decades - 4
David Attenborough5 decades - 5
Michel Foucault8 decades - 6
Jiang Zemin9 decades - 7
Miles Davis7 decades - 8
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing8 decades - 9
Harper Lee7 decades - 10
Chuck Berry6 decades - 11
Mel Brooks5 decades - 12
Alfredo Di Stéfano4 decades - 13
Leslie Nielsen5 decades - 14
Hugh Hefner6 decades - 15
Jerry Lewis7 decades - 16
Allen Ginsberg7 decades - 17
John Coltrane6 decades - 18
Klaus Kinski5 decades - 19
Tony Bennett6 decades - 20
Svetlana Alliluyeva1 decades - 21
Patricia Neal7 decades - 22
Sathya Sai Baba4 decades - 23
Cloris Leachman4 decades - 24
Yevgeny Leonov5 decades - 25
René Goscinny5 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.