← Fame through time1991
1991
Whose working lives fell in 1991. 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 1991, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Tom Hanks4 decades - 2
Mel Gibson4 decades - 3
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad2 decades - 4
Carrie Fisher4 decades - 5
Anthony Bourdain1 decades - 6
Theresa May2 decades - 7
Frank-Walter Steinmeier3 decades - 8
Bryan Cranston0 decades - 9
Martina Navratilova4 decades - 10
Christoph Waltz1 decades - 11
Larry Bird4 decades - 12
Geena Davis3 decades - 13
Björn Borg0 decades - 14
Lars von Trier3 decades - 15
Danny Boyle2 decades - 16
Christine Lagarde2 decades - 17
Paolo Rossi7 decades - 18
Tsai Ing-wen1 decades - 19
Andy Garcia3 decades - 20
Steve Ballmer3 decades - 21
Bob Saget0 decades - 22
Linda Hamilton3 decades - 23
David Copperfield7 decades - 24
Michel Houellebecq3 decades - 25
John Lydon2 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.