Fast facts about famous people
Trivia facts and fun factoids about famous people and not-so-famous people.
Jean Harlow was the first actress to appear on the cover of Life magazine, May 1937.
Mary Katherine Campbell was the only woman to win the Miss America title twice, 1922 and 1923.
Queen Isabella of Castile, who dispatched Christopher Columbus to find the Americas, boasted that she had only two baths in her life – at her birth and before she got married.
Cleopatra’s last name was Ptolemy, and she was Greek rather than Egyptian.
The people killed most often during bank robberies are the robbers.
The oldest person on record is Methuselah (969 years old).
Walt Disney
Walt Disney, the creator of Mickey Mouse, was afraid of mice.
Adriaan van der Donck was the first and only lawyer in New York City in 1653.
Burt Reynold’s father was the chief of police in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Before writing 007 novels, Ian Fleming studied languages at Munich and Geneva universities, worked with Reuters in Moscow, and then became a banker and stockbroker.
Until he was 18, Woody Allen read virtually nothing but comic books but did show his writing skills. He sold one-liners for ten cents each to gossip columnists.
Orville Wright numbered the eggs that his chickens produced so he could eat them in the order they were laid.
Julius Caesar was known as a great swimmer.
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth… and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, “His name is Mudd.”
Charles de Gaulle’s final words were, “It hurts.”
Sir Isaac Newton was an ordained priest in the Church of England.
Hugh “Ward Cleaver” Beaumont was an ordained minister.
Both Hitler and Napoleon were missing one testicle.
Joseph Stalin’s left foot had webbed toes and his left arm was noticably shorter than his right.
Joseph Stalin was 5’5″ (1.65 m) tall.
Winston Churchill was 5’6″ (1.68 m) tall.
Vladimir Putin is 5’7″ (1.7 m) tall.
Although he is often referred to as the “little corporal” Napoleon was of average height.
Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.
Al Capone
Al Capone’s business card stated that he was a used furniture dealer.
Al Capone died in prison from syphillis – despite being the first sufferer to be treated with antibiotics.
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain smoked forty cigars a day for the last years of his life.
Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 when Haley’s Comet came into view, and passed away on April 10, 1910, a day after Haley’s Comet came into view again.
Elizabeth Bacon Custer, wife of “The Boy General” is one of the few women buried at the US Military academy at West Point, New York.
Betsy Ross, who sew the first American flag, ran a munitions factory in her basement. Apparently she was born with a fully formed set of teeth.
American composer Charles Ives spent much of his time and money advocating an amendment to the US Constitution that would prevent any US citizen from earning more than $20,000 per year. Pulitzer Prize winning Ives earned much more than that.
Alexander Graham Bell
When Alexander Graham Bell passed away in 1922, every telephone served by the Bell system in the USA and Canada was silent for one minute.
Alexander Graham Bell never phoned his wife or mother because they were deaf.
King George I of England did not speak English.
Anne Boleyn had six fingernails on one hand.
Elizabeth I of England suffered from anthophobia, a fear of roses.
The German Kaiser Wilhelm II had a withered arm and often hid the fact by posing with his hand resting on a sword or by holding gloves.
The British royal family changed their surname (last name) from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, the name of their castle, in 1917.
A Duke is the highest rank you can achieve without being a king or a prince.
There are about 5,000 prince and princesses in each Saudi Arabian royal.
John Rolfe married Pocahontas the Red Indian Princess in 1613.
Pocahontas appeared on the back of the $20 bill in 1875.
George Washington grew marijuana in his garden.
Thomas Jefferson wrote his own epitaph without mentioning that he was US President.
It is said that on New Year’s Day, 1907, Theodore Roosevelt shook hands with 8,513 people.
Ronald Regan sent out the army photographer who first discovered Marilyn Monroe.
Robert Kennedy was killed in the Ambassador Hotel, the same hotel that housed Marilyn Monroe’s first modelling agency.
Charlie Brown’s father was a barber.
Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt were all cousins through one connection or another. (FDR and Eleanor were about five times removed.)
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.
Leonardo da Vinci could write with the one hand and draw with the other simultaneously.
Residents of the island of Lesbos, Greece are Lesbosians, rather than Lesbians.
If you come from Manchester, you are a Mancunian. If you come from Birmingham, you are a Brummie.
A person from Glasgow, is called a Glaswegian.
A person from the country of Nauru is called a Nauruan; this is the only palindromic nationality.
49.76% of the world population are female. In Quatar and UAE, less than 30% of the population are female. In the United States, 50.8% of the population are female. In Russia, 53.8% of the population are females.
If you’re over 100 years old, there’s an 80% chance you’re a woman.
The native tribe of Tierra del Fuego has a language so guttural it cannot have an alphabet.
According to Istat and Eurofound data, of people aged 18 to 34, 65% of Italians, 49% of Spanish, 46% of Greek, 42% of Germans, 34% of French and 25% of Britons still live with their parents.
The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
There are almost twice as many people in Rhode Island than there are in Alaska.
If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan project (when the first atomic bomb was made), your birthplace would have been listed as a post office box in Albuquerque.
A law in Iceland dating to 1615 requires citizens to shoot a Basque on sight. The law was repealed only in 2014.
Next to Warsaw, Chicago has the largest Polish population in the world.
Peter the Great
A Russian man who wore a beard during the time of Peter the Great had to pay a special tax.
About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 37.
Genghis Khan started out life as a goatherder.
French mime artist Marcel Marceau was Jewish, died on Yom Kippur several years ago and taught Michael Jackson how to mime in the early 1980’s.
Britney Spears used to book into hotels as “Allota Warmheart.”
Before becoming a successful actor, James Spader undertook jobs such as bartending, teaching yoga, driving a meat truck, loading railroad cars, and being a stable boy. See more Suprising first careers of famous people.
Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine are brother and sister.
Actor Val Kilmer grew up on Roy Rogers’ ranch.
Actor Mark Wahlberg has a third nipple.
Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.
Albert Einstien never wore any socks.
Atilla the hun was a dwarf.
Bob Hope and Billy Joel were both once boxers.
Warren Beatty once worked as a rat-catcher.
Drew Carey once worked at a Denny’s.
In high school, Robin Williams was voted “Least likely to succeed.”
Harrison Ford has a species of spider named after him.
Elvis Presley got a C in his eighth grade music class.
Billionaire Howard Hughes stored his own urine in large bottles.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis was secretly a chain smoker.
Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952 but he declined.
J. Edgar Hoover liked to fire FBI agents whose palms were sweaty when shaking hands.
In 1980, the city of Detroit presented Saddam Hussein with a key to the city.
In the UK by 2016, almost 10 million workers were aged 50+, up from 21% in 1992 and representing 31% of the UK’s employment workforce.
According to studies, men change their minds two to three times more often than women.
Che Guevara suffered from asthma.
Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were both epileptic.
Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.
Marie Curie, the Nobel prize winning scientist who discovered radium, died of radiation poisoning.
Approximately 70,000 people in the US are both blind and deaf.
Merit-Ptah (2700 BC) of Ancient Egypt is the world’s first known female physician.
Florence Nightingale was a statistical genius and is credited with inventing the pie chart.
In 1973, Swedish confectionery salesman Roland Ohisson was buried in a coffin made entirely of chocolate.
Dave Kunst
On 5th October 1974, four years, three months and sixteen days after Dave Kunste set out from Minnesota, he became the first man to walk around the world, having taken more than 20 million steps.
Winston Churchill was a stutterer. As a child, one of his teachers warned, “Because of his stuttering he should be discouraged from following in his father’s political footsteps.”
Amnesty International never took on Nelson Mandela’s case because they did not think him a political prisoner. He pleaded guilty to 156 acts of public violence and terrorism. At the time of his arrest in 1962, according to the Spectator, Mandela was a member of the South African Communist Party’s innermost central committee. As stern supporter of the Palistinian cause, he never acknowledged Israel.
The US has the highest documented per capita rate of imprisonment of any country in the world. About 2% of white males, 4% of Hispanic males and 10% of black males are incarcerated. There are more black males in prison than in colleges in the US.
About 1 in 30 people in the US are in jail, on probation, or on parole.
Half of all identity thieves are either relatives, friends, or neighbors of their victims.
Annually, approximately 250,000 American husbands are physically attacked and beaten by their wives.
In 1990, 2.9% of the world’s population lived in a country they were not born in; by 2015 that figure had grown to 3.3%.
In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II was named an “Honorary Harlem Globetrotter.”
Children laugh about 400 times a day, while adults laugh on average only 15 times a day.
An exocannibal eats only enemies. An indocannibal eats only friends.
Every day 200 million couples make love, 400,000 babies are born, and 140,000 people die.