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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#3001
Edith Evans
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Dame Edith Mary Evans, was an English actress. She was best known for her work on the stage, but also appeared in films at the beginning and towards the end of her career. Between 1964 and 1968, she was nominated for three Academy Awards.
Go to Profile#3002
Germaine Tailleferre
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Germaine Tailleferre was a French composer and the only female member of the group of composers known as Les Six. Biography Marcelle Germaine Taillefesse was born at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne, France, but as a young woman she changed her last name from "Taillefesse" to "Tailleferre" to spite her father, who had refused to support her musical studies. She studied piano with her mother at home, composing short works of her own, after which she began studying at the Paris Conservatory where she met Louis Durey, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Arthur Honegger. At the Paris Conservatory her skills were rewarded with prizes in several categories.
Go to Profile#3003
Ethel Barrymore
1879 - 1959 (80 years)
Ethel Barrymore was an American actress and a member of the Barrymore family of actors. Barrymore was a stage, screen and radio actress whose career spanned six decades, and was regarded as "The First Lady of the American Theatre". She received four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, winning for None but the Lonely Heart .
Go to Profile#3004
Lillie Langtry
1853 - 1929 (76 years)
Emilie Charlotte, Lady de Bathe , known as Lillie Langtry and nicknamed "The Jersey Lily", was a British socialite, stage actress and producer. Born on the island of Jersey, upon marrying she moved to London in 1876. Her looks and personality attracted interest, commentary, and invitations from artists and society hostesses, and she was celebrated as a young woman of great beauty and charm. During the aesthetic movement in England she was painted by aesthete artists, and in 1882 she became the poster-girl for Pears Soap, becoming the first celebrity to endorse a commercial product.
Go to Profile#3005
Celia Johnson
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson, was an English actress, whose career included stage, television and film. She is especially known for her roles in the films In Which We Serve , This Happy Breed , Brief Encounter and The Captain's Paradise . For Brief Encounter, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. A six-time BAFTA Award nominee, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie .
Go to Profile#3006
Françoise Rosay
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Françoise Rosay was a French opera singer, diseuse, and actress who enjoyed a film career of over sixty years and who became a legendary figure in French cinema. She went on to appear in over 100 movies in her career.
Go to Profile#3007
Lupe Vélez
1908 - 1944 (36 years)
María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez , known professionally as Lupe Vélez, was a Mexican actress, singer, and dancer during the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Vélez began her career as a performer in Mexican vaudeville in the early 1920s. After moving to the United States, she made her first film appearance in a short in 1927. By the end of the decade, she was acting in full-length silent films and had progressed to leading roles in The Gaucho , Lady of the Pavements and Wolf Song , among others. Vélez made the transition to sound films without difficulty. She was one of the first successful Mexican actresses in Hollywood.
Go to Profile#3008
Jane Ingham
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Rose Marie "Jane" Ingham was an English botanist and scientific translator. She was appointed research assistant to Joseph Hubert Priestley in the Botany Department at the University of Leeds, and together, they were the first to separate cell walls from the root tip of broad beans. They analysed these cell walls and concluded that they contained protein. She carried out experiments on the cork layer of trees to study how cells function under a change of orientation and found profound differences in cell division and elongation in the epidermal layer of plants.
Go to Profile#3009
Alice Guy-Blaché
1873 - 1968 (95 years)
Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché was a French pioneer filmmaker. She was one of the first filmmakers to make a narrative fiction film, as well as the first woman to direct a film. From 1896 to 1906, she was probably the only female filmmaker in the world. She experimented with Gaumont's Chronophone sync-sound system, and with color-tinting, interracial casting, and special effects.
Go to Profile#3010
Judith Anderson
1897 - 1992 (95 years)
Dame Frances Margaret Anderson, , known professionally as Judith Anderson, was an Australian actress who had a successful career in stage, film and television. A pre-eminent stage actress in her era, she won two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award and was also nominated for a Grammy Award and an Academy Award. She is considered one of the 20th century's greatest classical stage actors.
Go to Profile#3011
Renée Adorée
1897 - 1933 (36 years)
Renée Adorée was a French stage and film actress who appeared in Hollywood silent movies during the 1920s. She is best known for portraying the role of Melisande, the love interest of John Gilbert in the melodramatic romance and war epic The Big Parade. Adorée‘s career was cut short after she contracted tuberculosis in 1930. She died of the disease in 1933 at the age of 35.
Go to Profile#3012
Pauline Frederick
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Pauline Frederick was an American journalist in newspapers, radio and television, as well as co-author of a book in 1941 and sole author of a book in 1967. in her nearly 50-year career, she covered numerous stories ranging from politics and articles of particular interest to women to military conflicts, and public interest pieces. Her career extended from the 1930s until 1981; she is considered one of the pioneering women in journalism.
Go to Profile#3013
Kathleen Harrison
1892 - 1995 (103 years)
Kathleen Harrison was a prolific English character actress best remembered for her role as Mrs. Huggett in a trio of British post-war comedies about a working-class family's misadventures, The Huggetts. She later played the charwoman Mrs. Dilber opposite Alastair Sim in the 1951 film Scrooge and a Cockney charwoman who inherits a fortune in the television series Mrs Thursday .
Go to Profile#3014
Fanny Mendelssohn
1805 - 1847 (42 years)
Fanny Mendelssohn was a German composer and pianist of the early Romantic era who was also known as Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy and, after her marriage, Fanny Hensel . Her compositions include a piano trio, a piano quartet, an orchestral overture, four cantatas, more than 125 pieces for the piano and over 250 lieder, most of which were unpublished in her lifetime. Although lauded for her piano technique, she rarely gave public performances outside her family circle.
Go to Profile#3015
Evelyn Laye
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Evelyn Laye was an English actress and singer. Born into a theatrical family, she made her professional début in 1915 aged fifteen and quickly established herself in musical comedy. By 1920 she was starring in leading roles in the West End at Daly's and other theatres, becoming London's highest-paid star. Her first marriage, in 1926, to the performer Sonnie Hale was brief and ended in divorce after he abandoned her for the singer Jessie Matthews.
Go to Profile#3016
Alma Mahler
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Alma Mahler-Werfel was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well. 17 songs are known to have survived. At 15, she was mentored by Max Burckhard.
Go to Profile#3017
Abby Whiteside
1881 - 1956 (75 years)
Abby Whiteside was an American piano teacher. She challenged the finger-centric approach of much classical piano teaching and instead advocated a holistic attitude in which the arm and torso are the conductors of a musical image conceived first in the mind.
Go to Profile#3018
Ethel Smyth
1858 - 1944 (86 years)
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas.
Go to Profile#3019
Billie Burke
1884 - 1970 (86 years)
Mary William Ethelbert Appleton Burke was a Canadian-American actress who was famous on Broadway and radio, and in silent and sound films. She is best known to modern audiences as Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie musical The Wizard of Oz .
Go to Profile#3020
Janet Craxton
1929 - 1981 (52 years)
Janet Helen Rosemary Craxton was an English oboe player and teacher. She was the youngest of the six children and the only daughter of the pianist and teacher Harold Craxton. Her older brothers included the artist John Craxton. She married the composer Alan Richardson in 1961.
Go to Profile#3021
Eva Le Gallienne
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne gave up her Broadway appearances to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American repertory movement, which enabled today's off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself , Le Gallienne also became a respected stage director, coach, producer and manager.
Go to Profile#3022
Zhang Ruoming
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Zhang Ruoming was a Chinese scholar of French literature, translator and journalist. She was a professor at Yunnan University and considered an authority on the French author André Gide. She was one of the first Chinese women to earn a doctorate in France, graduating from the University of Lyon. In her youth, she was a leader in the May Fourth Movement in Tianjin and was known for her political association with Zhou Enlai and the Chinese Communist Party in France in the early 1920s.
Go to Profile#3023
Aira Kaal
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Aira Kaal was an Estonian writer. From 1931 to 1940, she studied in Tartu University, focusing on philosophy, but also learning Estonian literature, world literature and English. From 1938 to 1939, she worked in Great Britain, where she met her husband Arthur Robert Hone, with whom she returned to Estonia. From 1945 to 1950, she was a lecturer in the Tartu State University, teaching the foundations of Marxism-Leninism.
Go to Profile#3024
Dorothy Swaine Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Dorothy Swaine Thomas was an American sociologist and economist. She was the 42nd President of the American Sociological Association, the first woman in that role. Life and career Thomas was born on October 24, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland to John Knight and Sarah Swaine Thomas.
Go to Profile#3025
Patsy Cline
1932 - 1963 (31 years)
Patsy Cline was an American singer. She is considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century and was one of the first country music artists to cross over into pop music. Cline had several major hits during her eight-year recording career, including two number-one hits on the Billboard Hot Country and Western Sides chart.
Go to Profile#3026
Adela Rogers St. Johns
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies, but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine.
Go to Profile#3027
Violeta Parra
1917 - 1967 (50 years)
Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval was a Chilean composer, singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and visual artist. She pioneered the Nueva Canción Chilena , a renewal and a reinvention of Chilean folk music that would extend its sphere of influence outside Chile.
Go to Profile#3028
Leatrice Joy
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
Leatrice Joy was an American actress most prolific during the silent film era. Early life Joy was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to dentist Edward Joseph Zeidler, who was of Austrian and French descent, and Mary Joy Crimens, who was of German and Irish descent. She had a brother, Billy, who later worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Go to Profile#3029
Una Merkel
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Una Merkel was an American stage, film, radio, and television actress. Merkel was born in Kentucky and acted on stage in New York in the 1920s. She went to Hollywood in 1930 and became a popular film actress. Two of her best-known performances are in the films 42nd Street and Destry Rides Again. She won a Tony Award in 1956 and was nominated for an Oscar in 1961.
Go to Profile#3030
Ma Rainey
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was an American blues singer and influential early-blues recording artist. Dubbed the "Mother of the Blues", she bridged earlier vaudeville and the authentic expression of southern blues, influencing a generation of blues singers. Rainey was known for her powerful vocal abilities, energetic disposition, majestic phrasing, and a "moaning" style of singing. Her qualities are present and most evident in her early recordings "Bo-Weevil Blues" and "Moonshine Blues".
Go to Profile#3031
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#3032
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#3033
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#3034
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#3035
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#3036
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#3037
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#3038
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#3039
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#3040
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#3041
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 .
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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#3043
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#3044
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#3045
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#3046
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#3047
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#3048
Dolores Costello
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Dolores Costello was an American film actress who achieved her greatest success during the era of silent movies. She was nicknamed "The Goddess of the Silent Screen" by her first husband, the actor John Barrymore. She was the mother of John Drew Barrymore and grandmother of actress and talk show host Drew Barrymore.
Go to Profile#3049
Blanche Sweet
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Sarah Blanche Sweet was an American silent film actress who began her career in the early days of the motion picture film industry. Early life Born Sarah Blanche Sweet in Chicago, Illinois in 1896, she was the daughter of Pearl Alexander, a dancer, and Gilbert Joel Sweet, a wine merchant. The actors Antrim and Gertrude Short were cousins of Blanche. Her mother died when Blanche was an infant, and she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Cora Blanche Alexander. Cora Alexander found her many parts as a young child. At age 4, she toured in the play The Battle of the Strong with Marie Burroug...
Go to Profile#3050
Mary Lou Williams
1910 - 1981 (71 years)
Mary Lou Williams was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records . Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.
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