← Fame through time1989
1989
Whose working lives fell in 1989. 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 1989, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Jackie Channot measured- - 2
Hugo Chávez3 decades - 3
John Travolta5 decades - 4
Angela Merkel3 decades - 5
James Cameron7 decades - 6
Denzel Washington3 decades - 7
Alexander Lukashenko3 decades - 8
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan1 decades - 9
Oprah Winfrey4 decades - 10
Masoud Pezeshkiannot measured- - 11
François Hollande4 decades - 12
Condoleezza Rice3 decades - 13
Catherine O'Hara0 decades - 14
Ron Howard5 decades - 15
Kazuo Ishiguro3 decades - 16
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi0 decades - 17
Dennis Quaid4 decades - 18
Jerry Seinfeld3 decades - 19
Viktor Yushchenko2 decades - 20
Annie Lennox3 decades - 21
Ray Liotta2 decades - 22
Chris Evert5 decades - 23
Kathleen Turner4 decades - 24
Ang Lee3 decades - 25
Matt Groening3 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.