← Fame through time1981
1981
Whose working lives fell in 1981. 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 1981, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Donald Trump4 decades - 2
George W. Bush4 decades - 3
Bill Clinton4 decades - 4
Freddie Mercury3 decades - 5
Steven Spielberg5 decades - 6
Dolly Parton5 decades - 7
Sylvester Stallone5 decades - 8
Chernot measured- - 9
David Lynch4 decades - 10
Diane Keaton5 decades - 11
Susan Sarandon4 decades - 12
Liza Minnelli5 decades - 13
Alan Rickman3 decades - 14
Sally Field5 decades - 15
Ted Bundy4 decades - 16
Tommy Lee Jones4 decades - 17
Charlotte Rampling3 decades - 18
Tim Curry4 decades - 19
Hassanal Bolkiah3 decades - 20
Sonia Gandhi3 decades - 21
Patti Smith4 decades - 22
Timothy Dalton3 decades - 23
George Best4 decades - 24
Syd Barrett2 decades - 25
David Gilmour4 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.