← Fame through time1978
1978
Whose working lives fell in 1978. 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 1978, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Robert De Niro5 decades - 2
George Harrison8 decades - 3
Mick Jagger5 decades - 4
Bobby Fischer6 decades - 5
Lech Wałęsa1 decades - 6
John Kerry4 decades - 7
John Major8 decades - 8
Ben Kingsley4 decades - 9
Julio Iglesias8 decades - 10
Catherine Deneuve6 decades - 11
Keith Richards4 decades - 12
Malcolm McDowell5 decades - 13
Christopher Walken4 decades - 14
Roger Waters3 decades - 15
Joni Mitchell5 decades - 16
Joe Pesci3 decades - 17
Ratko Mladić1 decades - 18
David Cronenberg4 decades - 19
Billie Jean King5 decades - 20
Arthur Ashe5 decades - 21
John Denver5 decades - 22
Johnny Hallyday6 decades - 23
Penny Marshall3 decades - 24
Sam Shepard5 decades - 25
Vangelisnot 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.