Curated playlist
1907 births
- Jean BeaufretJean Beaufret was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Auzances, a small town in central France, and he would spend his life building a bridge between French philosophy and one of Germany's most contested thinkers. He died on the 7th of August…
- Katharine HepburnKatharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, a record no one else has matched. She wore trousers before women commonly did. She refused autographs, shunned the publicity machine, and once wrestled a camera from a…
- HergéGeorges Prosper Remi signed the first 500 copies of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets using the signature of his own fictional creation. Beside each one, his fiancee Germaine Kieckens drew the paw print of Snowy the dog. The man behind…
- John WayneMarion Robert Morrison weighed thirteen pounds when he was born at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa, on the 26th of May 1907. A fireman in Glendale, California, later renamed him for the dog he never went anywhere without, a huge…
- Laurence OlivierLaurence Kerr Olivier was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest child of a nomadic Church of England clergyman who never quite found a permanent post. By the time he was ten years old, Ellen Terry had written in her…
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy. He had planned to return to Oxford the following morning. Instead, he was buried five days later in the…
- L. Sprague de Camp"My own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do," L. Sprague de Camp said, explaining why he rarely used pen names. Over a career spanning 60 years, he wrote more than 100 books. By the 1930s and 1940s he had become…
- Paul NitzePaul Henry Nitze was born on the 16th of January, 1907, in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a family with deep roots in German academic life. His father, William Albert Nitze, was a professor of Romance linguistics who built his career at the…
- Frida KahloFrida Kahlo's 1940 self-portrait The Dream sold in 2025 for $54.7 million. That is the highest price any work by a woman artist has ever reached at auction. Behind that painting stands a Mexican artist known worldwide for portraits,…
- Astrid LindgrenAstrid Lindgren was born on the 14th of November 1907 in Näs, near Vimmerby, in the Swedish province of Småland. By the time she died, on the 28th of January 2002, she had sold roughly 167 million books worldwide and had been translated…
- Frederick CoplestonFrederick Charles Copleston was born on the 10th of April 1907 in the parish of Trull, near Taunton in Somerset, and he would go on to write one of the most comprehensive accounts of philosophy ever produced in the English language. His…
- Lucien LaurentLucien Laurent scored the most historically significant goal in the history of football, and almost nobody at the time understood what they had just witnessed. On the 13th of July 1930, at the Estadio Pocitos in Montevideo, Uruguay, a…