← Fame through time1966
1966
Whose working lives fell in 1966. 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 1966, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Mikhail Gorbachev4 decades - 2
Boris Yeltsin4 decades - 3
Robert Duvall5 decades - 4
Raúl Castro9 decades - 5
Toni Morrison5 decades - 6
Rupert Murdoch5 decades - 7
William Shatner5 decades - 8
Anne Bancroft7 decades - 9
Leonard Nimoy5 decades - 10
Roger Penrose3 decades - 11
Rajneesh3 decades - 12
John le Carré2 decades - 13
James Earl Jones6 decades - 14
Desmond Tutu4 decades - 15
Isabel Martínez de Perón5 decades - 16
Ian Holm4 decades - 17
Rita Moreno5 decades - 18
Chun Doo-hwan4 decades - 19
Larry Hagman4 decades - 20
Olympia Dukakis2 decades - 21
Anita Ekberg4 decades - 22
Mike Nichols6 decades - 23
Mário Zagallo0 decades - 24
Angie Dickinson6 decades - 25
Rip Tornnot 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.