The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#2901
Maria von Trapp
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Maria Augusta von Trapp DHS , often styled as “Baroness”, was the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. She wrote The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which was published in 1949 and was the inspiration for the 1956 West German film The Trapp Family, which in turn inspired the 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music and its 1965 film version.
Go to Profile#2902
Elsie Ferguson
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Elsie Louise Ferguson was an American stage and film actress. Seen by some as an early feminist, she promoted suffrage, which she discussed in interviews, and supported animal rights. Early life Born in New York City, Elsie Ferguson was the only child of Hiram and Amelia Ferguson. Her father was a successful attorney. Raised and educated in Manhattan, she became interested in the theater at a young age and made her stage debut at 17 as a chorus girl in a musical comedy. For almost two years, from 1903 to 1905, she was a cast member in The Girl from Kays. In 1908, she was leading lady to Edgar Selwyn in Pierre of the Plains.
Go to Profile#2903
Constance Talmadge
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Constance Alice Talmadge was an American silent film star. She was the sister of actresses Norma and Natalie Talmadge. Early life Talmadge was born on April 19, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, to poor parents, Margaret L. "Peg" and Frederick O. Talmadge. Her father was an alcoholic, and left them when she was still very young. Her mother made a living by doing laundry. When a friend recommended Talmadge's mother use older sister Norma as a model for title slides in flickers, which were shown in early nickelodeons, Peg decided to do so. This led all three sisters into acting careers.
Go to Profile#2904
Mary Gray Peck
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Mary Gray Peck was an American journalist, educator, suffragist, and clubwoman. She was interested in economic and industrial problems of women, and investigated labor conditions in Europe and the United States. Born in New York, she studied at Elmira College, University of Minnesota, and University of Cambridge before becoming an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Later, she became associated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, College Equal Suffrage League, National American Woman Suffrage Association, Women's Trade Union League, Woman Suffrage Party, and the Modern Language Association.
Go to Profile#2905
Anny Ondra
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Anny Ondra was a Czech film actress. She began her career in 1920 and appeared in Czech, German, Austrian, French and English films. In 1933, she married German boxing champion Max Schmeling. Life Ondra was born in Tarnów to Czech parents, Bohumír Ondrák, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and Anna Ondráková . She had two brothers, Tomáš and Jindřich. She spent her childhood in Tarnów, Pula and Prague. At seventeen she acted in the theatre and in her first film, which was directed by her then boyfriend, director and actor Karel Lamač. When her family learned of it, they had a shouting m...
Go to Profile#2906
Edna May Oliver
1883 - 1942 (59 years)
Edna May Oliver was an American stage and film actress. During the 1930s, she was one of the better-known character actresses in American films, often playing tart-tongued spinsters. Career Born in Malden, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ida May and Charles Edward Nutter, Oliver quit school at age 14 to pursue a stage career.
Go to Profile#2907
Alice Brady
1892 - 1939 (47 years)
Alice Brady was an American actress who began her career in the silent film era and survived the transition into talkies. She worked until six months before her death from cancer in 1939. Her films include My Man Godfrey , in which she plays the flighty mother of Carole Lombard's character, and In Old Chicago for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Go to Profile#2908
Rosa Ponselle
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Rosa Ponzillo, known as Rosa Ponselle was an American operatic dramatic soprano. She sang mainly at the New York Metropolitan Opera and is generally considered to have been one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#2909
Lois Weber
1879 - 1939 (60 years)
Florence Lois Weber was an American silent film director, screenwriter, producer and actress. She is identified in some historical references as among "the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films". Film historian Anthony Slide has also asserted, "Along with D.W.Griffith, Weber was the American cinema's first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies".
Go to Profile#2910
Josephine Baker
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Freda Josephine Baker , naturalised as Joséphine Baker, was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by and .
Go to Profile#2911
Magdalena Avietėnaitė
1892 - 1984 (92 years)
Magdalena Avietėnaitė was a Lithuanian journalist, diplomat and a public figure. Biography In 1899, Avietėnaitė and her family emigrated to Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1914 she graduated from the University of Geneva in the field of literature and philosophy. From 1914 to 1920, she edited the weekly newspaper Amerikos lietuvis .
Go to Profile#2912
Maria Anna Mozart
1751 - 1829 (78 years)
Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart , called "Marianne" and nicknamed Nannerl, was a musician, the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and daughter of Leopold and Anna Maria Mozart . Childhood Maria Anna Mozart was born in Salzburg. When she was seven years old, her father Leopold Mozart started teaching her to play the harpsichord. Leopold took her and Wolfgang on tours of many cities, such as Vienna and Paris, to showcase their talents. In the early days, she sometimes received top billing, and she was noted as an excellent harpsichord player and fortepianist.
Go to Profile#2913
Kay Kendall
1927 - 1959 (32 years)
Justine Kay Kendall McCarthy was an English actress and comedienne. She began her film career in the musical film London Town , a financial failure. Kendall worked regularly until her appearance in the comedy film Genevieve brought her widespread recognition. Prolific in British films, Kendall also achieved some popularity with American audiences, and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her role in the musical-comedy film Les Girls .
Go to Profile#2914
Clara Kimball Young
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Clara Kimball Young was an American film actress who was popular in the early silent film era. Early life Edith Matilda Clara Kimball was born in Chicago on September 6, 1890, the only child to Edward Kimball and Pauline Madeline Kimball , both of whom were traveling stock actors. She made her stage debut at the age of three, and throughout her early childhood traveled with her parents and acted with their theater company. She attended St. Francis Xavier Academy in Chicago. Afterward, she was hired into a stock company and resumed her stage career, traveling extensively through the United St...
Go to Profile#2915
Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau was a French pacifist, feminist and journal editor. In 1900, she went to Canada where she became a lecturer at McGill University until 1908 when she returned to France. In 1911, she subscribed to the newspaper La Française, the source of her appetite for feminism. After the end of the First World War, she became Secretary of the Union pour le Suffrage des Femmes and President of the Union Féminine pour la Société des Nations. She is also remembered for the extensive correspondence she maintained with family members, former students and war veterans.
Go to Profile#2916
Teresa Carreño
1853 - 1917 (64 years)
María Teresa Gertrudis de Jesús Carreño García was a Venezuelan pianist, soprano, composer, and conductor. Over the course of her 54-year concert career, she became an internationally renowned virtuoso pianist and was often referred to as the "Valkyrie of the Piano". Carreño was an early adopter of the works of one of her students, American composer and pianist Edward MacDowell and premiered several of his compositions across the globe. She also frequently performed the works of Norwegian composer and pianist Edvard Grieg . Carreño composed approximately 75 works for solo piano, voice and piano, choir and orchestra, and instrumental ensemble.
Go to Profile#2917
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. She gained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s with her gospel recordings, characterized by a unique mixture of spiritual lyrics and electric guitar. She was the first great recording star of gospel music, and was among the first gospel musicians to appeal to rhythm and blues and rock and roll audiences, later being referred to as "the original soul sister" and "the Godmother of rock and roll". She influenced early rock-and-roll musicians including Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry...
Go to Profile#2918
Lea Luboshutz
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Lea Luboshutz was a Russian violinist. She had a performing career in Europe and the United States of America, settling in America and becoming a teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She was the mother of the conductor Boris Goldovsky and the sister of the pianist Pierre Luboshutz and the cellist, Anna Luboshutz.
Go to Profile#2919
Lucia Dunham
1932 - 1959 (27 years)
Lucia Dunham was an American voice teacher, classical soprano, and academic writer on singing and diction who is chiefly remembered as a longtime professor of vocal performance at the Juilliard School from 1922-1956.
Go to Profile#2920
Alice Gordon Gulick
1847 - 1903 (56 years)
Alice Gordon Gulick was an American missionary teacher in Spain. Early life Alice Winfield Gordon was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts, the daughter of James M. Gordon and Mary Clarkson Gordon. Her parents were active in the abolition movement; her sisters Anna Adams Gordon and Elizabeth Putnam Gordon were temperance activists. She attended Mount Holyoke Seminary from 1863 to 1867.
Go to Profile#2921
Nasreen Mohamedi
1937 - 1990 (53 years)
Nasreen Mohamedi was an Indian artist best known for her line-based drawings, and is today considered one of the most essential modern artists from India. Despite being relatively unknown outside of her native country during her lifetime, Mohamedi's work has been the subject of remarkable revitalisation in international critical circles and has received popular acclaim over the last decade. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, documenta in Kassel, Germany, and at Talwar Gallery, which organised the first solo exhibit...
Go to Profile#2922
Ann Richards
1935 - 1982 (47 years)
Ann Richards was an American pop and jazz singer. She was the second wife of bandleader Stan Kenton. She had a short career in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Early life, musical education and influences Ann Richards was born Margaret Ann Borden on October 1, 1935, in San Diego, California, but raised to the north in Albany, California. Her father William left the family after Ann's mother had an affair and child with one of her students. By 1940, her mother Bernice was divorced and Ann's mother's maiden name of Richards was adopted. Her mother taught school and also wanted her daughter to become a teacher.
Go to Profile#2923
Berta Elena Vidal de Battini
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Berta Elena Vidal de Battini was an Argentine linguist, educationalist, writer and folklorist, whose life achievement is 10-volume selection of the Argentinian Folk Tales and Legends. Biography Berta de Battini was born in 1900 in San Luis, Argentina.
Go to Profile#2924
Dora Zaslavsky
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Dora Zaslavsky Koch was an American pianist who was one of the first graduates of and later a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music. Early life Zaslavsky was born in the Russian Empire in 1904, arriving in New York as an infant on February 22, 1905. Her family was Jewish, from the city of Kremenchuk in the oblast of Poltava. Her father Max had emigrated to the United States the previous year. She was traveling with her mother Celia née Fleisher, older siblings Joseph and Fay, and a young cousin. Another brother Israel was born six years later. Other sources give Zaslavsky’s birth year as 1905, but this is incompatible with the ship manifest information.
Go to Profile#2925
Clara Angela Macirone
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Clara Angela Macirone was an English pianist and composer who published her music as C. A. Macirone. Born in London, she was the daughter of Italian musicians; her mother was also a pianist and her father was an amateur tenor. She began her studies at the Royal Academy of Music in 1879 under Cipriani Potter, W H Holmes, Charles Lucas and others. She later took a position teaching at the Academy.
Go to Profile#2926
Jeanne Behrend
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Jeanne Behrend was an American pianist, music educator, musicologist and composer. Life Jeanne Behrend was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the Curtis Institute in 1934, where she studied piano with Josef Hofmann and composition with Rosario Scalero. She made her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1922 and at Carnegie Hall in 1937, playing one of her own compositions.
Go to Profile#2927
Anny Konetzni
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Anny Konetzni was an Austrian soprano. She was the sister of soprano Hilde Konetzni. Born in Vienna, Anny Konetzni was a pupil of Erik Schmedes in her hometown, making her debut in Chemnitz as a contralto in 1927. Soon she became a dramatic soprano, singing at the Berlin Staatsoper from 1931 until 1935 and at the Vienna State Opera from 1935 until 1954. She tackled all the heavier parts in the operas of Richard Wagner. Konetzni bowed at the Royal Opera House in 1935 as Brünnhilde in Der Ring des Nibelungen; she had made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Brünnhilde the previous year. She returned to London every year until World War II, and again in 1951.
Go to Profile#2928
Ana Itelman
1927 - 1989 (62 years)
Ana Itelman was a Chilean-born dancer and choreographer, who spent most of her career in Argentina and the United States. Serving as a professor at Bard College and then director of the school of dance, she toured internationally between 1957 and 1969. In 1970, she returned to Argentina and established a contemporary dance theater. She was honored with the Konex Award for choreography in 1989.
Go to Profile#2929
Cleota Collins
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Cleota J. Collins was an American soprano singer and music educator. She was one of the founding members of the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1919. Early life Cleota Josephine Collins was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of Ira A. Collins and Josie Collins. Her father was a clergyman. Cleota Collins studied music at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and abroad in France and Italy, as the student of Emma Azalia Hackley, with further studies in New York.
Go to Profile#2930
Katherine Bacon
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Katherine Bacon was an English classical pianist and faculty member of the Juilliard School of Music. She was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England, and died in New York, New York, United States.
Go to Profile#2931
Hilda Jerea
1916 - 1980 (64 years)
Hilda Jerea was a Romanian-Jewish pianist, conductor, and composer. Born in Iaşi, she began her education at the Conservatory of Music in Iaşi and finished it in Bucharest where her teachers were Mihail Jora, Florica Musicescu and Dimitrie Cuclin. After graduation she pursued further studies in Paris and Budapest. She played the piano in concertos or chamber ensembles from 1936. Her best-known composition is the oratorio Under the Wake-Up Sun from 1951. She was distinguished with the State Prize of Romania and the Order of Labour.
Go to Profile#2932
Alberta Masiello
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Alberta Masiello , was an assistant-conductor and opera coach at the Metropolitan Opera; a panelist in the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera Quiz on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, and teacher at the Juilliard School and at Mannes School of Music.
Go to Profile#2933
Lilith Lorraine
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Lilith Lorraine was the pen-name of Mary Maude Dunn Wright an American pulp fiction author, poet, journalist and editor. Early life Mary Maude Dunn was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, the daughter of John Beamond "Red" Dunn and Lelia Nias Dunn. Her father was a Texas Ranger. She attended the Incarnate Word Academy in Corpus Christi, and earned a teaching certificate at age 16. She taught in a rural Texas school as a young woman.
Go to Profile#2934
Kemp Stillings
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Katharine Kemp Stillings was a violinist, composer, and music educator. Early life Katharine Kemp Stillings was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and began studying violin from a very early age. She went to Berlin to study with Joseph Joachim, and to Saint Petersburg for further studies with Leopold Auer.
Go to Profile#2935
Ellen Ballon
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ellen Ballon was a Canadian pianist. The daughter of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, she was born in Montreal, Quebec. A child prodigy, she gave her first concert at the age of five and began studying music at the McGill Conservatorium with Clara Lichtenstein at the age of six.
Go to Profile#2936
Bessie Smith
1894 - 1937 (43 years)
Bessie Smith was an African-American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the "Empress of the Blues", she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, she is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists.
Go to Profile#2937
Lynn Fontanne
1887 - 1983 (96 years)
Lynn Fontanne was an English actress. After early success in supporting roles in the West End, she met the American actor Alfred Lunt, whom she married in 1922 and with whom she co-starred in Broadway and West End productions over the next four decades. They became known as "The Lunts", and were celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic.
Go to Profile#2938
Alla Nazimova
1879 - 1945 (66 years)
Alla Nazimova was a Russian-American actress, director, producer and screenwriter. On Broadway, she was noted for her work in the classic plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev. She later moved on to film, where she served many production roles, both writing and directing films under pseudonyms. Her film Salome is regarded as a cultural landmark.
Go to Profile#2939
Sarah Siddons
1755 - 1831 (76 years)
Sarah Siddons was a Welsh actress, the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century. Contemporaneous critic William Hazlitt dubbed Siddons as "tragedy personified". She was the elder sister of John Philip Kemble, Charles Kemble, Stephen Kemble, Ann Hatton, and Elizabeth Whitlock, and the aunt of Fanny Kemble. She was most famous for her portrayal of the Shakespearean character Lady Macbeth, a character she made her own.
Go to Profile#2940
Gertrude Buck
1871 - 1922 (51 years)
Gertrude Buck was one of a group of powerful female rhetoricians of her time. She strived to inspire young women to take on leadership roles within the democracy using the written word. She wrote many books, plays, articles, and poems relating to her cause. Buck dedicated her life to "challenging the patriarchal paradigm with her reformist views of pedagogy and rhetoric".
Go to Profile#2941
Lois Wilson
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Lois Wilson was an American actress who worked during the silent film era. She also directed two short films and was a scenario writer. Early life Born to Andrew Kenley Wilson and Constance in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wilson's family moved to Alabama when she was still very young. She earned a degree from Alabama Normal College , and became a school teacher for young children, soon leaving to pursue a film career.
Go to Profile#2942
Elisabeth Grümmer
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Elisabeth Grümmer was a German soprano. She has been described as "a singer blessed with elegant musicality, warm-hearted sincerity, and a voice of exceptional beauty". Life Elisabeth Schilz was born in Niederjeutz [now Yutz, near Diedenhofen , Alsace-Lorraine] to German parents. In 1918, her family was expelled from Lorraine, and they settled in Meiningen, where she studied theater and made her stage debut as Klärchen in Goethe's Egmont.
Go to Profile#2943
Maybelle Carter
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
"Mother" Maybelle Carter was an American country musician and "among the first" to use the Carter scratch, with which she "helped to turn the guitar into a lead instrument." It was named after her. She was a member of the original Carter Family act from the late 1920s until the early 1940s and a member of the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle group.
Go to Profile#2944
Memphis Minnie
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Lizzie Douglas , better known as Memphis Minnie, was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted for over three decades. She recorded around 200 songs, some of the best known being "When the Levee Breaks", "Me and My Chauffeur Blues", "Bumble Bee" and "Nothing in Rambling".
Go to Profile#2945
Dorothy Ashby
1932 - 1986 (54 years)
Dorothy Jeanne Thompson , better known as Dorothy Ashby, was an American jazz harpist, singer and composer. Hailed as one of the most "unjustly under loved jazz greats of the 1950s" and the "most accomplished modern jazz harpist," Ashby established the harp as an improvising jazz instrument, beyond earlier use as a novelty or background orchestral instrument, proving the harp could play bebop as adeptly as the instruments commonly associated with jazz, such as the saxophone or piano.
Go to Profile#2946
Marcella Sembrich
1858 - 1935 (77 years)
Prakseda Marcelina Kochańska , known professionally as Marcella Sembrich, was a Polish dramatic coloratura soprano. She is known for her extensive range of two and a half octaves, precise intonation, charm, portamento, vocal fluidity, and impressive coloratura. Her voice was regarded as flute-like, sweet, pure, light, and brilliant. She had an important international singing career, chiefly at the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, in London.
Go to Profile#2947
Jennie Tourel
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Jennie Tourel was an American operatic mezzo-soprano, known for her work in both opera and recital performances. Early years Tourel was born in Vitebsk in the Russian Empire , with the surname Davidovich. As a young girl she played the flute, then studied piano. After the Russian Revolution, her Jewish family left Russia and settled temporarily near Danzig. They later moved to Paris, where she continued to study piano and contemplated a concert career. She then began to take voice lessons with Reynaldo Hahn and Anna El-Tour, and decided to devote herself to professional singing. She was sai...
Go to Profile#2948
Elisabeth C. Draper
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Elisabeth C. Draper was a prominent interior decorator in New York City. Mrs. Draper was one of the grande dames of decorating in an era when a professionally decorated home was a mark of privilege. She became known for comfortable rooms that mixed antiques with contemporary furnishings.
Go to Profile#2949
Nico
1938 - 1988 (50 years)
Christa Päffgen , known by her stage name Nico, was a German singer, songwriter, actress and model. She had roles in several films, including Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls . Reviewer Richard Goldstein describes Nico as "half goddess, half icicle" and writes that her distinctive voice "sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning".
Go to Profile#2950
Jeanette MacDonald
1903 - 1965 (62 years)
Jeanette Anna MacDonald was an American singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier and Nelson Eddy . During the 1930s and 1940s she starred in 29 feature films, four nominated for Best Picture Oscars , and recorded extensively, earning three gold records. She later appeared in opera, concerts, radio, and television. MacDonald was one of the most influential sopranos of the 20th century, introducing opera to film-going audiences and inspiring a generation of singers.
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