← Fame through time1986
1986
Whose working lives fell in 1986. 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 1986, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Robin Williams7 decades - 2
Gordon Brown7 decades - 3
Phil Collins4 decades - 4
Ayman al-Zawahiri2 decades - 5
Kurt Russell4 decades - 6
Michael Keaton3 decades - 7
Sting7 decades - 8
Geoffrey Rush2 decades - 9
Mark Hamill4 decades - 10
Bonnie Tyler0 decades - 11
Stellan Skarsgård0 decades - 12
Kirstie Alley2 decades - 13
Kevin Keegan2 decades - 14
Shehbaz Sharif0 decades - 15
Anjelica Huston3 decades - 16
Mohamed Morsi1 decades - 17
Louis van Gaal1 decades - 18
Kathryn Bigelow2 decades - 19
Jill Biden0 decades - 20
Jane Seymour7 decades - 21
Anatoly Karpov5 decades - 22
Kenny Dalglish1 decades - 23
John Deacon1 decades - 24
Claudio Ranieri1 decades - 25
Prabowo Subianto0 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.