Literature
Considered one of the greatest playwrights in the history of English, this writer is known for many plays that we've read in middle school, high school and college.
William Shakespeare
This Philadelphia born musician died in a plane crash in 1973, cutting short what would have been a long career (he had only written about 40 songs at the time of his death). One of his hits from the era has the lyric, "She's living in LA, with my old ex-best friend Ray. I guy she said she knew well, but sometimes hated."
Jim Croce
"Shorty - Chau chi lan tsu tsa tsa!"
"Oh my God is he nuts?"
"He's not nuts. He's crazy."
Indiana Jones
An American former professional basketball player. Considered one of the greatest small forwards of all time, along with Michael Jordan played an important role in transforming the Chicago Bulls into a championship team and popularizing the NBA around the world during the 1990s.
Scottie Pippen
This Spanish artist's most famous piece is a large 1937 oil painting (Guernica). It is regarded by many art critics as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history and made him world famous.
Pablo Picasso
Known for his satire and novels about The Mississippi River, this late 19th/early 20th century writer, is also known for another novel of political satire in which two children are switched at birth (one a slave, the other a son of a plantation family). Both boys learn about this fact when they are older.
Mark Twain
This famous man was a childhood prodigy of the late 18th century. It is documented that he wrote his first sonatas on the harpsichord at age 5. He had a tumultuous relationship with his father (who controlled his career for most of his life). He died at 35, penniless and in an anonymous grave with other bodies in Vienna.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
"Infamous is when you're more than famous. This man El Guapo is not just famous, he's infamous."
The Three Amigos
An American professional baseball pitcher who played in Negro league baseball and Major League Baseball (MLB). His career spanned five decades and culminated with his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Satchel Paige
Born in Pittsburgh this American visual artist became a film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture.
Andy Warhol
This American writer was injured in battle while he was an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I. Later, he'd go on to write in Paris, report on The Spanish Civil War, own property in Cuba and eventually commit suicide in Key West, Florida.
Earnest Hemingway
This Romani-Belgian jazz guitarist and composer was one of the first major jazz talents to emerge in Europe and has been hailed as one of its most significant players of a style that would come to be called "gypsy-jazz."
Django Reinbardt
I'm an exceptional thief Mrs. McClane. And since I'm moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite."
Die Hard
He helped lead the New York Mets to a World Series championship in 1986 and the New York Yankees to two World Series championships in 1996 and 1999. He was also suspended three times by MLB for substance abuse, leading to many narratives about his massive potential going unfulfilled
Darryl Strawberry
This Florence-born artist was lauded by contemporary biographers as the most accomplished artist of the 16th century. He achieved fame early; two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before the age of thirty.
Michelangelo
This colonial English writer who lived in and wrote about late 19th / early 20th century India. He is famous for many novels (and one story in particular that was turned into a Disney Movie). In recent decades, he has been criticized for being colonialist.
Rudyard Kipling.
Now 90 years old, this American singer, songwriter, musician, political activist and actor was one of the main figures of outlaw country, a sub-genre of country music that developed in the late 1960s as a reaction to the conservative restrictions in Nashville.
Willie Nelson
“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."
Annie Hall
An American football quarterback in the NFL. Following a stint with Ohio State, he played college football at LSU, where he won the Heisman Trophy and the 2020 College Football Playoff National Championship as a senior.
Joe Burrow
He was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Perhaps the most famous Jewish American in the 20th and 21st century, this man of letters hails from the exotic city of Newark, New Jersey. He wrote almost 30 novels and countless other works of non-fiction and essays. One of his most-remembered works is "Portnoy's Complaint" where protagonist - Alexander Portnoy - talks about male, anxiety, mommy issues and fantasies for dating non-Jewish women.
Philip Roth
This Italian singer became completely blind, following a brain hemorrhage resulting from a football accident. After performing evenings in piano bars and competing in local singing contests, he signed his first recording contract and rose to fame in 1994, winning the newcomer’s section of the 44th Sanremo Music Festival performing "Il mare calmo della sera".
Since 1994, he has recorded 15 solo studio albums of both pop and classical music, three greatest hits albums, and nine complete operas, selling over 75 million records worldwide
Andrea Bocelli
"What we've got here is a failure to communicate."
The Captain in Cool Hand Luke.
This German tennis player won the gentlemen's singles Wimbledon Championships title at 17 in 1985. He is regarded as one of the greatest tennis players of all time and was featured in the list of Tennis magazine's 40 greatest players on its 40th anniversary in 2006. He won 64 titles overall, including an Olympic gold medal in doubles in 1992. He's German.
Boris Becker
An American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. He first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture.
Jean-Michel Basquiat