← Fame through time1985
1985
Whose working lives fell in 1985. 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 1985, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Narendra Modi2 decades - 2
Stevie Wonder5 decades - 3
Viktor Yanukovych2 decades - 4
Sergey Lavrov2 decades - 5
Steve Wozniak4 decades - 6
Bill Murray6 decades - 7
Zaha Hadid3 decades - 8
Richard Branson4 decades - 9
Ed Harris4 decades - 10
Agnetha Fältskog0 decades - 11
Anne, Princess Royal0 decades - 12
William Hurt4 decades - 13
Peter Gabriel4 decades - 14
Jay Leno3 decades - 15
Robbie Coltrane1 decades - 16
Vicente del Bosque1 decades - 17
William H. Macy1 decades - 18
Martin Short3 decades - 19
Rajinikanth1 decades - 20
Bill Irwin3 decades - 21
Ron Perlman0 decades - 22
Chen Shui-bian4 decades - 23
Chuck Schumer2 decades - 24
Tom Petty4 decades - 25
Brad Dourif1 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.