← Fame through time1987
1987
Whose working lives fell in 1987. 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 1987, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Vladimir Putin3 decades - 2
Steven Seagal3 decades - 3
Liam Neeson3 decades - 4
Vajiralongkorn0 decades - 5
John Goodman7 decades - 6
Douglas Adams4 decades - 7
Patrick Swayze3 decades - 8
Christopher Reeve4 decades - 9
Jeff Goldblum4 decades - 10
Robert Zemeckis3 decades - 11
Mickey Rourke4 decades - 12
Isabella Rossellini5 decades - 13
Roberto Benigni5 decades - 14
Cyril Ramaphosa4 decades - 15
David Hasselhoff2 decades - 16
Dan Aykroyd4 decades - 17
Shigeru Miyamoto0 decades - 18
Paul Reubens0 decades - 19
Jimmy Connors5 decades - 20
Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani0 decades - 21
Mandy Patinkin3 decades - 22
Harvey Weinstein2 decades - 23
Park Geun-hye1 decades - 24
Gary Moore3 decades - 25
Emomali Rahmon2 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.