More on the oldest famous person

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Following up on our discussion from the other day, Paul Campos writes:

Fame itself is a complex concept. For example, we have at least a couple of important variables to take into account:

(1) Cultural contingency. Someone can be immensely famous within a particular subculture but largely unknown to the broader public. A couple of examples that come to my mind are the historian Jacques Barzun, who lived to be 104 — I guess for a while he was a name that your typical New York Times reader might have sort of recognized — and the economist Ronald Coase, who died recently at 102.

Also too, I think it’s difficult to get a firm grasp on how much the fame of certain people is a function of the socio-economic background of the audience that makes them famous. Gelman suggests that the most famous really old person at the moment might be Henry Kissinger, but how famous is Kissinger in broader American culture at the moment? What percentage of Americans could identify him? This isn’t a rhetorical question: I really have no idea. I do suspect that the percentage of Americans who could identify Kim Kardashian is a lot higher, however. She’s an example of an intensely famous person who will be almost completely unknown in 50 years, probably, while a lot of people, relatively speaking, will still recognize Kissinger’s name then.. So this is all very complicated.

This is most obviously true from a cross-national perspective. The most famous person in Thailand is somebody I’ve no doubt never heard of. Etc. So we’re talking from an early 21st century American perspective here. . . .

(2) Peak fame versus career fame, to riff off Bill James’s old concept of peak versus career value for baseball players. Somebody can be sort of famous for an extremely long time, while somebody else can be much more famous than the former person for a short period, but then much less famous over the long run. For example, Lee Harvey Oswald might have been one of the five most famous people in the world for a few weeks in 1963. Today I bet the vast majority of Americans don’t know who he was.

The second point reminds me of how transitory almost all fame ultimately is. History shows again and again that the vast majority of the most famous people of any era are almost completely forgotten within a couple of generations.

So Gelman’s question involves trying to meld a couple of deeply incommensurable variables — age, which is extremely well defined, and fame, which is an inherently fuzzy and moving target — into a single metric. . . .

These are all good points. Just to give a sense of where I’m coming from: I don’t think of Jacques Barzun or Ronald Coase as famous. I don’t even think of John von Neumann or Stanislaw Ulam as famous. Or Paul Dirac. These people are very accomplished, but, to me, true fame requires some breakthrough into the general population. Kim Kardashian, sure, she’s super-famous. Maybe in 100 years her name will have some resonance, the same sort of fame associated now with names such as Mary Pickford and Fatty Arbuckle?

I do think that peak fame should count for something. I’m looking at you, Mark Spitz. Also lifetime fame. I guess that Beverly Cleary was never a “celebrity,” but 70 years of Beezus and Ramona books were enough to keep her name in the public eye for a long time. This also makes it clear that there are lots and lots and lots of famous people.

What about people who were very famous for a short amount of time but were otherwise obscure? There’s the “Where’s the Beef” lady from 1984, but more generally lots and lots of actors in TV commercials. I remember when I was a kid, someone in school asked if my mom was the lady in the Clorox 2 ad. Back in the second half of the twentieth century, lots of people were briefly famous—or, their faces were famous—for being in ads that were given saturation coverage. Similarly, there are zillions of long-forgotten sex symbols . . . maybe Bo Derek would still be considered some kind of celebrity? And there were pop stars with #1 hits and lots of radio and TV stars. “The Fonz” would still count as famous, I think, but most of the other stars on that show, I guess not. You could play the same game with athletes. I’d still count Pete Rose as famous—some combination of having a high peak level of fame, staying at that peak for several years, holding a lifetime record, and staying in the news.

James Lovelock is arguably the oldest famous person on this list of living centenarians. If I had to make the call, I wouldn’t quite count Lovelock as famous. But I would say that he’s more famous than Jacques Barzun or Ronald Coase, in the sense that there was a time when Lovelock was “in the conversation” in a way that Barzun and Coase weren’t—even if they were greater scholars.

I think I’d still have to go with Norman Lear as oldest famous living person, with Henry Kissinger as the backup if you don’t want to count Lear as truly famous anymore. On the other hand, if Al Jaffee or Roger Angell somehow manage to live another 10 years, then I think they would count as famous. As Campos points out, every year you live past 100 is impressive, so if you’re even barely famous and you reach 110, that’s notable. To keep this conversation on track, if you look at that list of living centenarians, you’ll notice that the vast majority of them were never even close to famous. Many of them are accomplished, but accomplishment is not the same as fame.

Looking at these sorts of lists and seeing name after name of accomplished-but-not-famous people: this gives us a sense of the rarity of true fame.

Above I’ve defined, in some implicit sense, what I mean by “famous”—again, an early 21st century American perspective.

Here’s a question: according to these implicit criteria, how many famous people are alive today? Actually, let’s just restrict to people over the age of 80 so we don’t have to worry about how to count transient fame. (Will Novak Djokovic or Patrick Mahomes be famous in 50 or 60 years? Who can say?)

We can back out this number by starting with famous very old people and then using demographic calculations. By my definition, the two oldest famous people are Norman Lear (age 99) and Henry Kissinger (age 98). Some Googling seems to reveal that there are about 100,000 people in the U.S. over the age of 100. Lear and Kissinger are almost 100, so let’s just round up and say that, for these oldsters, approximately 2 in 100,000 are famous. So, according to this implicit definition, approximately 1 in 50,000 people achieve enduring fame, where “enduring” is defined as that, if you happen to be lucky enough to reach 100, you’re still famous. But even that is biased by my age. For example, I’ll always think of Barry Levinson as famous—he made Diner!—but, yeah, he’s not really famous, actually I guess he’s never been famous.

As Campos points out, another factor is that there are more famous men than famous women, but, each year, men are more likely to die than women. The breakeven point seems to be about 100: I guess that most famous 90-year-olds are men, but most famous 105-year-olds (to the extent there are any) will be women.

Finally, Campos writes, “The person I’ve found — again, from the perspective of current American culture etc. — who has the highest sustained fame to extreme age ratio is probably Olivia de Havilland. She died recently at the age of 104. She was extremely famous for a couple of decades, and still sort of famous when she died.” I’m still holding out for Beverly Cleary, who was born before and died later than Havilland. But it’s a different kind of fame. Havilland was a celebrity, which was never the case with Cleary.

P.S. Campos’s post has 545 comments! At first I was going to say I’m envious that he gets so many more comments than we do, but in retrospect I guess we have just the right number of comments here, giving a range of perspectives and sharing lots of interesting ideas, but few enough that I can read all of them and often reply.

P.P.S. I’d still like to see the sequence of oldest famous people (from the Anglo-American-European perspective, I guess), starting now and going backward through the centuries.

P.P.P.S. Luis Echeverría just turned 100. He was president of Mexico during the 1970s so there must be lots of people who know who he is.

30 thoughts on “More on the oldest famous person”

  1. I doubt Lear or Kissinger would be considered famous by anyone in the year 2022 under the age of 40. I had never even heard of Norman Lear prior to this (and the previous, related) post. I suspect many other under-40-year-olds haven’t either.

    I’d consider the Fonz to be more famous to the current population in 2022 than either Lear or Kissinger as well (if you were to score popularity/fame by age and then weight score across the 2022 age distribution). Henry Winkler has remained surprisingly culturally relevant over the last 50 years, transitioning his role in Happy Days to numerous popular movies (e.g. The Waterboy), critically acclaimed TV shows (Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation, Barry), and viral social media posts (latest being a series of Tik Tok videos of him dancing–he has 1.3 million Tik Tok followers). There’s some sort of generational relevance Winkler has (just to use one example).

    As you suggest, maybe this type of cross-sectional evaluation arrives at a different outcome than would a longitudinal evaluation of fame. I guess a different way to calculate “most famous” could be, for each birth cohort, determine the cumulative fame of a person, by year, to year 2022, and sum up years of fame across all relevant birth cohorts (say 1922 to 2002 to get summed fame for 20-year-olds to 100-year-olds). Maybe since Kissinger and Lear are pretty well-known to folks 50+ years of age, they would likely have accumulated more fame-years than folks such as Kim Kardashian.

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    • Abc:

      Yeah, Lear used to be very famous, but over the years he’s moved more into the “accomplished” category. Still, he’s a zillion times more famous than Barzun or Coase, who never in their lives had mass fame. I feel like Kissinger has some enduring fame, but then again I follow politics!

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    • The various methods that can be used to aggregate values to so they can be reported as rates, or standardized measures is really interesting/confounding to me. (a thing I was reminded of today via unrelated anecdote)*

      I think the idea of accumulated fame-years is good, but you could measure it in reverse (and I don’t think it would be the same, but maybe). So instead of figuring out how many years the person would qualify as famous for. For each famous person, you could accumulate the number of years the people currently alive would qualify them as famous, admittedly a much more intense procedure… but it would weight people like Dolly Parton, Cher and the Henrys (Winkler and Kissinger) pretty high (older people would have been aware of them for longer, but there are fewer of them, many younger people are still aware of them, but have had less time to add to fame-years.). Lots of confusing ways to aggregate data

      * I answered a question from my husband about a medicine which has a side-effect profile (probably in post-market data) reported as a rate per 100 person years of treatment. Which seemed insane, until he clarified it was a daily maintenance med for a chronic illness (so would be taken for many years.) Another doctor was using that side-effect as a reason to discontinue it as a 2 week course for another illness. I am always stunned at how many ways you could interpret rate data like that (when it is something like post-market reporting). A really small looking rate could mean hundreds of reports, and a really large appearing rate could be a single incident. And unless you are a specialist who knows how commonly it is prescribed, those numbers are sort of meaningless to you

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  2. Campos writes, “I do suspect that the percentage of Americans who could identify Kim Kardashian is a lot higher, however. She’s an example of an intensely famous person who will be almost completely unknown in 50 years, probably, while a lot of people, relatively speaking, will still recognize Kissinger’s name then.. So this is all very complicated.”

    This assumes that Kardashian will not one day be President/Emperor of the United States, which is an exceedingly optimistic view of the future.

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  3. > The person I’ve found — again, from the perspective of current American culture etc. — who has the highest sustained fame to extreme age ratio is probably Olivia de Havilland.

    I think that Kirk Douglas wins on the fame-under-the-curve front – but I could be wrong. And he was not even a year younger than her at the time of death – born five months later, dead five months earlier.

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  5. Regarding the earlier related question of famous people who like Jacques Cousteau were the only famous person in their class, would Gandhi qualify as the only world-famous nonviolence advocate of his generation?

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  6. For the record, Kissinger’s first name at birth is “Heinz” and not “Henry”. On all the old audio clips, his first name is invariably “Dr”. And, of course, the English pronunciation of his last name softens the “g”, making it easier for him to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

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  7. I don’t really know who any of your “really famous” examples are including Kim Kardashian (sure I’ve heard the name used… That’s about it) and I’m A mid 40s american…

    Now Von Neumann, Feynman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Madonna, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, I’d take any of them over pretty much anyone on your list

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    • Daniel:

      Sure, but the people on your list are either dead or way under 100 years old. If Neil Armstrong had lived to be 100, then sure, he’d be one of the oldest famous people to have ever lived. Coming up with super-famous people is easy. The age thing is what makes it challenging.

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      • I think the point is if you have to be REALLY famous like say Neil Armstrong or Miles Davis, then maybe the oldest really famous person is someone like Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan… The more you relax the degree of famousness the older you can go. So age and famousness are tied together statistically at least.

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        • Daniel:

          Jimmy Carter is 97 and is pretty damn famous. Sure, he’s not as accomplished as Miles Davis, but I bet he’s more famous in the U.S. and even in the world.

        • Tony Bennett is 95, fifteen years older than Dylan and McCartney and no less famous than Davis or Armstrong. (None of them is as famous as Kim Kardashian, though.)

          And he was still recording and performing until a few months ago (with the Kardashian-level famous Lady Gaga).

        • Sure, I’m not really calling out individuals as candidates, I’m pointing out that the threshold you set for being “really famous” changes who the candidates are and that will tend to push the age down. Tony Bennett might be the oldest “really famous” person when defined by one threshold for famousness but he might not make the cut if he needs to be as famous as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. If the threshold is lower, then maybe Beverly Cleary would have counted.

        • Moving the goal posts a bit, ain’t ya?

          You wrote “if you have to be REALLY famous like say Neil Armstrong or Miles Davis”.

          If that’s the threshold for being REALLY famous, Tony Bennett is REALLY famous. And he’s alive. And he’s 95.

          If the new threshold is “as famous as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln” maybe he isn’t a candidate. But Elizabeth II definitely fits the bill. And she’s also alive. And she’s also 95. Actually she’s older than Tony Bennett!

          The age is not going down that much, is it? Not down to 80, that’s for sure.

      • (Ok, I agree with your – obvious – point that the any famous person won’t be famous any longer if you raise the threshold sufficiently. But your examples of “maybe the oldest really famous person is someone like” were very bad. And there are not that many people of any age more famous than the longest-reigning Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc.)

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        • I’m like the LEAST good person to ask who is famous. I have for example, never in my entire life owned a television, nor had as my favorite musician anyone who is actively producing pop music (in high school my favorite music was Bach and Wagner… later I got really into 1960’s Jazz, then after Jerry died I really started enjoying the Grateful Dead and moved into a variety of other non-pop music). The last movie I saw in the theater was Finding Nemo about 20 years ago. My wife recently said something about Meghan Markle and I said “who is that?”. I couldn’t pick Kim Kardashian out of a lineup of celebrities if my life depended on it, at least not without the help of Google. If you showed me randomly either a Picture of Queen Elizabeth II vs her deceased mother I’d probably not know which was which.

          So, yeah, as far as I’m concerned It’s pretty much just John Lennon and Jesus and like John, I’m not sure who is more famous.

  9. Some Googling seems to reveal that there are about 100,000 people in the U.S. over the age of 100
    Unfair, this looks like a change of rules. Most of my famous people are unlikely to be from the USA or I’d look at them differently. For example, I have never thought of Olivia de Havilland as an American.

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  10. How about this famous non-American, non-male: Gina Lollobrigida? She is 94 and has had two separate careers–acting and photography. Wikipedia claims

    “She photographed, among others, Paul Newman, Salvador Dalí, Henry Kissinger [he does get around a lot!], David Cassidy, Audrey Hepburn, Ella Fitzgerald, and the German national football team. She even managed to obtain an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro, leader of Communist Cuba.”

    And, “Lollobrigida has a habit of referring to herself in the third person.” My case rest.

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  13. I also had no idea how famous Henry Kissinger is so I ran a quick experiment. I created a Google Survey with a single question, “Do you know who Henry Kissinger is”, and asked google to show it to 500 people in the US of all ages and genders. 54.6% of them said yes. This is obviously not a very good experiment, but the yes percentage is much higher than I expected, and this seems like decent evidence that Henry Kissinger is indeed quite famous (in the US).

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