Everyone who's anyone is marking today as the bicentennial of the most impressive shared birthdate in history. But if Darwin and Lincoln constitute the greatest of all shared birthdates, which pair is in second place on the shared-hit parade? One could argue that there isn't much point in looking for more. Still, it surprised me that googling same birthdate revealed so little. I found pages to look up artists, musicians, etc. who share your birthday (not birthdate, i.e., same day in same year), and several links to the probability theory birthday problem.
The only good resource was FamousBirthdays.com, where there were several thousand birthdays, sortable by date. Culling that list, I found well over 100 pairs (and some trios) of shared birthdates.
To whet your appetite, some prime pairs:
- Margaret Thatcher / Lenny Bruce [10/13/1925]
- George W. Bush / Sylvester Stallone [7/6/1946]
- Mike Ditka / Lee Harvey Oswald [10/18/1939]
Want more? Follow me below the fold...
I should mention that I wrote a similar post -- with even more shared birthdates -- in the wee hours of this morning on Peace Tree Farm, and that I first broached the topic here on dKos in a comment in Seneca Doane's diary Happy 200th birthday, Abe and Charles! (And thanks.).
There were many fascinating sets of shared birthdates on the list I was able to compile. We might start with the sublime:
- Albert Finney / Glenda Jackson [5/9/1936]
- Mario Lemieux / Patrick Roy [10/5/1965]
- Tommy Lee Jones / Oliver Stone [9/15/1946]
- Van Morrison / Itzhak Perlman [8/31/1945]
- Daryl Hannah / Julianne Moore [12/3/1960]
- Eminem / Wyclef Jean [10/17/1972]
- Michael Caine / Quincy Jones [3/14/1933]
- Jackie Joyner-Kersee / Herschel Walker [3/3/1962]
- Francis Ford Coppola / David Frost [4/7/1939]
- Edward Norton / Christian Slater [8/18/1969]
And move on, of course, to the ridiculous:
- Rudy Giuliani / Gladys Knight [5/28/1944]
- Ray Kroc / Larry Fine (of the Three Stooges) [10/5/1902]
- Al Gore / Rhea Perlman [3/31/1948]
- Madeleine Albright / Trini Lopez [5/15/1937]
- Marilyn Monroe / Andy Griffith [6/1/1926]
- Harry Caray / Ralph Ellison [3/1/1914]
- Condoleezza Rice / Yanni [11/14/1954]
- Greta Garbo / Eddie "Rochester" Anderson (Jack Benny sidekick) [9/18/1905]
- Lynne Cheney / David Crosby [8/14/1941]
- Hubert Humphrey / Vincent Price [5/27/1911]
- Anouk Aimée / Casey Kasem [4/27/1933]
- Federico Fellini / DeForest Kelley [1/20/1920]
Then there are the trios, of which I located three that might bear some interest:
- Divine / John Lithgow / Jeannie C. Riley [10/19/1945]
- Hillary Clinton / Jaclyn Smith / Pat Sajak [10/26/1946]
- Tom Seaver / Danny DeVito / Lorne Michaels [11/17/1944]
Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter, Alex P. Keaton's parents on Family Ties, were both born on 6/21/1947.
Who was born on 7/23/1973? Nomar Garciaparra and Monica Lewinsky.
Paul McCartney shares 6/18/1942 with Roger Ebert. Merle Haggard and Billy Dee Williams share 4/6/1937. Both Carol Channing and Norman Mailer were born on 1/31/1923, and Doris Day shares 4/3/1924 with Marlon Brando. David Letterman's date of birth is 4/12/1947, as is Tom Clancy's. Audie Murphy and Chet Atkins both drew their first breaths on 6/20/1924. Eva Longoria shares 3/15/1975 with Will.i.am.
I list quite a few more pairs, though without the specific birthdates, in my blog post at Peace Tree Farm. The original dataset from FamousBirthdays.com included even more than I put on my list, but I didn't recognize the names. Then again, those younger than this Boomer may not recognize some of the names on my lists.
Meanwhile, getting back to the original question about which pair of individuals might be in (distant) second place to the Darwin-Lincoln entry we're lauding today, I submit the two gentlemen born on May 6, 1856 -- Sigmund Freud and Admiral Robert E. Peary. If anyone out there can come up with a better set of candidates, I'm all ears.