← Fame through time1996
1996
Whose working lives fell in 1996. 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 1996, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Barack Obama2 decades - 2
Diana, Princess of Wales0 decades - 3
Tupac Shakur3 decades - 4
George Clooney3 decades - 5
Eddie Murphy4 decades - 6
James Gandolfini1 decades - 7
Michael J. Fox4 decades - 8
Sanae Takaichi0 decades - 9
Enya3 decades - 10
Woody Harrelson3 decades - 11
Peter Jackson6 decades - 12
Meg Ryan3 decades - 13
Yevgeny Prigozhinnot measured- - 14
Ilham Aliyev2 decades - 15
Laurence Fishburne3 decades - 16
Forest Whitaker3 decades - 17
Wayne Gretzky4 decades - 18
Lothar Matthäus3 decades - 19
Susan Boyle1 decades - 20
Arundhati Roy3 decades - 21
Jennifer Coolidge0 decades - 22
Dennis Rodman3 decades - 23
Ricky Gervais1 decades - 24
Nastassja Kinski3 decades - 25
Stephen Hillenburg0 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.