← Fame through time1980-1989
The 1980s
Whose names filled the books of the 1980s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in English books during the 1980s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus30 - 2
Aristotle7.0 - 3
Plato6.1 - 4
Johns Hopkins4.8 - 5
Homer4.4 - 6
George Washington3.4 - 7
Socrates3.1 - 8
Augustus2.8 - 9
Ronald Reagan2.7 - 10
Virgil2.4 - 11
Cicero2.3 - 12
Thomas Jefferson1.5 - 13Ababa1.4
- 14
Mark Twain1.4 - 15
John F. Kennedy1.3 - 16
Ovid1.3 - 17
Jimmy Carter1.2 - 18
Woodrow Wilson1.1 - 19
Euclid1.1 - 20
Brigham Young1.1 - 21
Rembrandt1.1 - 22
Indira Gandhi1.1 - 23
Adam Smith1.0 - 24
Abraham Lincoln1.0 - 25
Cleopatra1.00
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1980s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Donald Trump4 decades - 2
Vladimir Putin3 decades - 3
George W. Bush4 decades - 4
Xi Jinping3 decades - 5
Bill Clinton4 decades - 6
Benjamin Netanyahu4 decades - 7
Freddie Mercury3 decades - 8
Robin Williams7 decades - 9
Steven Spielberg5 decades - 10
Arnold Schwarzenegger4 decades - 11
Narendra Modi2 decades - 12
Jackie Channot measured- - 13
David Bowie5 decades - 14
Meryl Streep4 decades - 15
Bob Marley5 decades - 16
Dolly Parton5 decades - 17
Stephen King8 decades - 18
Sylvester Stallone5 decades - 19
Hugo Chávez3 decades - 20
Hillary Clinton3 decades - 21
Chernot measured- - 22
Elton John5 decades - 23
Ozzy Osbourne3 decades - 24
Pablo Escobar4 decades - 25
John Travolta5 decades - 26
Angela Merkel3 decades - 27
James Cameron7 decades - 28
David Lynch4 decades - 29
Denzel Washington3 decades - 30
Sigourney Weaver4 decades - 31
Bruce Springsteen5 decades - 32
Pierce Brosnan3 decades - 33
Tony Blair3 decades - 34
Diane Keaton5 decades - 35
Liam Neeson3 decades - 36
Helen Mirren4 decades - 37
Steven Seagal3 decades - 38
Alexander Lukashenko3 decades - 39
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan1 decades - 40
George R. R. Martin1 decades - 41
Oprah Winfrey4 decades - 42
Susan Sarandon4 decades - 43
Eric Clapton5 decades - 44
Al Gore4 decades - 45
Jeffrey Epstein0 decades - 46
Phil Collins4 decades - 47
Salman Rushdie4 decades - 48
Samuel L. Jackson3 decades - 49
Stevie Wonder5 decades - 50
Liza Minnelli5 decades - 51
Alan Rickman3 decades - 52
Johan Cruyff4 decades - 53
Sally Field5 decades - 54
John Goodman7 decades - 55
Richard Gere4 decades - 56
Vajiralongkornnot measured- - 57
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva1 decades - 58
Alla Pugacheva5 decades - 59
Benazir Bhutto4 decades - 60
Rodrigo Duterte1 decades - 61
Ted Bundy4 decades - 62
Goldie Hawn5 decades - 63
Bill Murray6 decades - 64
Condoleezza Rice3 decades - 65
François Hollande4 decades - 66
Masoud Pezeshkiannot measured- - 67
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar5 decades - 68
Hulk Hogan3 decades - 69
Patrick Swayze3 decades - 70
Franz Beckenbauer5 decades - 71
Sergey Lavrov2 decades - 72
Kathy Bates3 decades - 73
Kim Basinger4 decades - 74
Brian May3 decades - 75
Jeff Bridges5 decades - 76
Jeremy Irons4 decades - 77
Sheikh Hasina4 decades - 78
Tommy Lee Jones4 decades - 79
Steve Wozniak4 decades - 80
Glenn Close4 decades - 81
Neil Young5 decades - 82
Mitt Romney2 decades - 83
Haruki Murakami2 decades - 84
Gérard Depardieu5 decades - 85
Viktor Yanukovych2 decades - 86
Gordon Brown7 decades - 87
Christopher Reeve4 decades - 88
Charles IIInot measured- - 89
Kurt Russell4 decades - 90
Rod Stewart5 decades - 91
Jessica Lange4 decades - 92
Michael Keaton3 decades - 93
Aung San Suu Kyi4 decades - 94
Alice Cooper5 decades - 95
Ed Harris4 decades - 96
Rob Reiner5 decades - 97
Catherine O'Hara0 decades - 98
Richard Branson4 decades - 99
Farrah Fawcett5 decades - 100
Sam Neill3 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. 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.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.