← Fame through time1982
1982
Whose working lives fell in 1982. 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 1982, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Arnold Schwarzenegger4 decades - 2
David Bowie5 decades - 3
Stephen King8 decades - 4
Hillary Clinton3 decades - 5
Elton John5 decades - 6
Salman Rushdie4 decades - 7
Johan Cruyff4 decades - 8
Paulo Coelho2 decades - 9
Mitt Romney2 decades - 10
Brian May3 decades - 11
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar5 decades - 12
Glenn Close4 decades - 13
Farrah Fawcett5 decades - 14
James Woods6 decades - 15
Rob Reiner5 decades - 16
Sam Neill3 decades - 17
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall0 decades - 18
Tom Clancy4 decades - 19
Carlos Santana6 decades - 20
Iggy Pop3 decades - 21
Richard Dreyfuss5 decades - 22
O. J. Simpson5 decades - 23
Dilma Rousseff1 decades - 24
Kevin Kline4 decades - 25
Takeshi Kitano0 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.