← Fame through time1964
1964
Whose working lives fell in 1964. 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 1964, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Martin Luther King Jr.6 decades - 2
Audrey Hepburn7 decades - 3
Grace Kelly7 decades - 4
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis4 decades - 5
Yasser Arafat5 decades - 6
Christopher Plummer7 decades - 7
Ursula K. Le Guin5 decades - 8
Lev Yashinnot measured- - 9
Sergio Leone6 decades - 10
Bud Spencer5 decades - 11
Yayoi Kusama2 decades - 12
Oriana Fallaci6 decades - 13
Max von Sydow6 decades - 14
Ed Asner3 decades - 15
Hassan II of Morocco6 decades - 16
Imelda Marcos5 decades - 17
Jacques Brel6 decades - 18
Milan Kundera6 decades - 19
Bob Newhart6 decades - 20
Jürgen Habermas8 decades - 21
Sam Cooke5 decades - 22
Jean Simmons7 decades - 23
Barbara Walters5 decades - 24
John Cassavetes6 decades - 25
Irene Papas2 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.