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.
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#3001
Dora Carrington
1893 - 1932 (39 years)
Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.
Go to Profile#3002
Mary Pickford
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Gladys Marie Smith , known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian actress resident in the U.S., and also producer, screenwriter and film studio founder, who was a pioneer in the US film industry with a Hollywood career that spanned five decades.
Go to Profile#3003
C. L. Moore
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Catherine Lucille Moore was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, who first came to prominence in the 1930s writing as C. L. Moore. She was among the first women to write in the science fiction and fantasy genres . Moore's work paved the way for many other female speculative fiction writers.
Go to Profile#3004
Vesta Tilley
1864 - 1952 (88 years)
Matilda Alice Powles, Lady de Frece was an English music hall performer. She adopted the stage name Vesta Tilley and became one of the best-known male impersonators of her era. Her career lasted from 1869 until 1920. Starting in provincial theatres with her father as manager, she performed her first season in London in 1874. She typically performed as a dandy or fop, also playing other roles. She found additional success as a principal boy in pantomime.
Go to Profile#3005
Rose Wilder Lane
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Rose Wilder Lane was an American writer and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is one of the most influential advocates of the American libertarian movement.
Go to Profile#3006
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
1890 - 1998 (108 years)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass , which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring .
Go to Profile#3007
Alice Neel
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.
Go to Profile#3008
Mary Wigman
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Mary Wigman was a German dancer and choreographer, notable as the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes. She is considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.
Go to Profile#3009
Pauline Viardot
1821 - 1910 (89 years)
Pauline Viardot was a French dramatic mezzo-soprano, composer and pedagogue of Spanish descent. Born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García, she came from a musical family and took up music at a young age. She began performing as a teenager and had a long and illustrious career as a star performer.
Go to Profile#3010
Maria Callas
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Maria Callas was an American-born Greek soprano who was one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century. Many critics praised her bel canto technique, wide-ranging voice and dramatic interpretations. Her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, and further to the works of Verdi and Puccini, and in her early career to the music dramas of Wagner. Her musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina .
Go to Profile#3011
Marianne Brandt
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Marianne Brandt was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt in Dessau in 1928. Today, Brandt's designs for household objects such as lamps and ashtrays are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages.
Go to Profile#3012
Zenobia Camprubí
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Zenobia Camprubí Aymar was a Spanish-born writer and poet; she was also a noted translator of the works of Rabindranath Tagore. She was born in Malgrat de Mar to a Puerto Rican mother and a Spanish father.
Go to Profile#3013
Helen Hayes
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Helen Hayes MacArthur was an American actress whose career spanned eighty-two years. She eventually received the nickname "First Lady of American Theatre" and was the second person and first woman to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award . She was also the first person to win the Triple Crown of Acting. Hayes also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, from President Ronald Reagan in 1986. In 1988, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Go to Profile#3014
Lillian Gish
1893 - 1993 (100 years)
Lillian Diana Gish was an American actress, director, and screenwriter. Her film-acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912, in silent film shorts, to 1987. Gish was called the "First Lady of American Cinema", and is credited with pioneering fundamental film performance techniques. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gish as the 17th greatest female movie star of Classic Hollywood cinema.
Go to Profile#3015
Elli Alexiou
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Elli Alexiou was a Greek author, playwright and journalist. The daughter of a printer and publisher, Alexiou was born in Heraklion, Crete. She taught French in a high school, and was politically active, joining the Communist Party in 1928 and working with the National Liberation Front resistance during World War II. After the war, she received a scholarship from the French government and studied in Paris. She was stripped of Greek citizenship in 1950, living as an exile until it was restored in 1965.
Go to Profile#3016
Louise Brooks
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Mary Louise Brooks was an American film actress and dancer during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.
Go to Profile#3017
Jenny Lind
1820 - 1887 (67 years)
Johanna Maria Lind was a Swedish opera singer, often called the "Swedish Nightingale". One of the most highly regarded singers of the 19th century, she performed in soprano roles in opera in Sweden and across Europe, and undertook an extraordinarily popular concert tour of the United States beginning in 1850. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music from 1840.
Go to Profile#3018
Nellie Melba
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Dame Nellie Melba was an Australian operatic lyric coloratura soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician. She took the pseudonym "Melba" from Melbourne, her home town.
Go to Profile#3019
Pola Negri
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Pola Negri was a Polish stage and film actress and singer. She achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles. She was also acknowledged as a sex symbol.
Go to Profile#3020
Mary Garden
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Mary Garden was a Scottish-American operatic lyric soprano, then mezzosoprano with a substantial career in France and America in the first third of the 20th century. She spent the latter part of her childhood and youth in the United States and eventually became an American citizen, although she lived in France for many years and eventually retired to Scotland, where she spent the last 30 years of her life and died.
Go to Profile#3021
Margaret Rutherford
1892 - 1972 (80 years)
Dame Margaret Taylor Rutherford, was an English actress of stage, television and film. She came to national attention following World War II in the film adaptations of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award for her role as the Duchess of Brighton in The V.I.P.s . In the early 1960s, She starred as Agatha Christie's character Miss Marple in a series of four George Pollock films. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1961 and a Dame Commander in 1967.
Go to Profile#3022
Anna Magnani
1908 - 1973 (65 years)
Anna Maria Magnani was an Italian actress. She was known for her explosive acting and earthy, realistic portrayals of characters. Born in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as "La Lupa", the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passion...
Go to Profile#3023
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#3024
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#3025
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#3026
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#3027
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#3028
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#3029
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#3030
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#3031
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#3032
Mahalia Jackson
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
Mahalia Jackson was an American gospel singer, widely considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century. With a career spanning 40 years, Jackson was integral to the development and spread of gospel blues in black churches throughout the U.S. During a time when racial segregation was pervasive in American society, she met considerable and unexpected success in a recording career, selling an estimated 22 million records and performing in front of integrated and secular audiences in concert halls around the world.
Go to Profile#3033
Maria Malibran
1808 - 1836 (28 years)
Maria Felicia Malibran was a Spanish singer who commonly sang both contralto and soprano parts, and was one of the best-known opera singers of the 19th century. Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death in Manchester, England, at age 28. Contemporary accounts of her voice describe its range, power and flexibility as extraordinary.
Go to Profile#3034
Thea von Harbou
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German screenwriter, novelist, film director, and actress. She is remembered as the screenwriter of the science fiction film classic Metropolis and for the 1925 novel on which it was based. von Harbou collaborated as a screenwriter with film director Fritz Lang, her husband, during the period of transition from silent to sound films.
Go to Profile#3035
Maude Adams
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Maude Ewing Adams Kiskadden , known professionally as Maude Adams, was an American actress and stage designer who achieved her greatest success as the character Peter Pan, first playing the role in the 1905 Broadway production of Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. Adams' personality appealed to a large audience and helped her become the most successful and highest-paid performer of her day, with a yearly income of more than $1 million during her peak.
Go to Profile#3036
Clara Butt
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Dame Clara Ellen Butt was an English dramatic contralto and one of the most popular singers from the 1890s through to the 1920s. She had an exceptionally fine contralto voice and an agile singing technique, and impressed contemporary composers such as Saint-Saëns and Elgar; the latter composed his Sea Pictures, Op. 37 with her voice in mind.
Go to Profile#3037
Dinah Washington
1924 - 1963 (39 years)
Dinah Washington was an American singer and pianist, one of the most popular black female recording artists of the 1950s. Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performed and recorded in a wide variety of styles including blues, R&B, and traditional pop music, and gave herself the title of "Queen of the Blues". She was a 1986 inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.
Go to Profile#3038
Norma Talmadge
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Norma Marie Talmadge was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box-office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.
Go to Profile#3039
Lotte Lehmann
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Charlotte "Lotte" Pauline Sophie Lehmann was a German-American lyric soprano noted for her successful performances with international opera houses, on the recital stage and in teaching.She gave memorable appearances in the operas of Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Ludwig van Beethoven, Puccini, Mozart, and Massenet. The Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, Sieglinde in Die Walküre and the title-role in Fidelio are considered her greatest roles. During her long career, Lehmann also made almost five hundred recordings in both opera and art song.
Go to Profile#3040
Asta Nielsen
1881 - 1972 (91 years)
Asta Sofie Amalie Nielsen was a Danish silent film actress who was one of the most popular leading ladies of the 1910s and one of the first international movie stars. Seventy of Nielsen's 74 films were made in Germany where she was known simply as Die Asta .
Go to Profile#3041
Augusta Webster
1837 - 1894 (57 years)
Augusta Webster born in Poole, Dorset as Julia Augusta Davies, was an English poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator. Biography Augusta was the daughter of Vice-admiral George Davies and Julia Hume, she spent her younger years on board the ship he was stationed, the Griper.
Go to Profile#3042
Edith Head
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Edith Head was an American costume designer who won a record eight Academy Awards for Best Costume Design between 1949 and 1973, making her the most awarded woman in the Academy's history. Head is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential costume designers in film history.
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Pearl Bailey
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Pearl Mae Bailey was an American actress, singer and author. After appearing in vaudeville, she made her Broadway debut in St. Louis Woman in 1946. She received a Special Tony Award for the title role in the all-black production of Hello, Dolly! in 1968. In 1986, she won a Daytime Emmy award for her performance as a fairy godmother in the ABC Afterschool Special Cindy Eller: A Modern Fairy Tale. Her rendition of "Takes Two to Tango" hit the top ten in 1952.
Go to Profile#3044
Vivian Vance
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Vivian Vance was an American actress best known for playing Ethel Mertz on the sitcom I Love Lucy , for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress, among other accolades. She also starred alongside Lucille Ball in The Lucy Show from 1962 until she left the series at the end of its third season in 1965. In 1991, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is most commonly identified as Lucille Ball’s longtime comedic foil from 1951 until her death in 1979.
Go to Profile#3045
Kirsten Flagstad
1895 - 1962 (67 years)
Kirsten Malfrid Flagstad was a Norwegian opera singer, who was the outstanding Wagnerian soprano of her era. Her triumphant debut in New York on 2 February 1935 is one of the legends of opera. Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the longstanding General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera said, “I have given America two great gifts — Caruso and Flagstad.”
Go to Profile#3046
Jill Ireland
1936 - 1990 (54 years)
Jill Dorothy Ireland was an English actress and singer. She appeared in 16 films with husband Charles Bronson, and was involved in two of Bronson’s other films as a producer. Early life Born in Hounslow, Ireland was the daughter of a wine importer.
Go to Profile#3047
Wakamatsu Shizuko
1864 - 1896 (32 years)
Wakamatsu Shizuko was a Japanese educator, translator, and novelist best known for translating Little Lord Fauntleroy written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. She is also known for introducing literature with Christianity for children's novels.
Go to Profile#3048
P. L. Travers
1899 - 1996 (97 years)
Pamela Lyndon Travers was an Australian-British writer who spent most of her career in England. She is best known for the Mary Poppins series of books, which feature the eponymous magical nanny. Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up in the Australian bush before being sent to boarding school in Sydney. Her writing was first published when she was a teenager, and she also worked briefly as a professional Shakespearean actress. Upon emigrating to England at the age of 24, she took the name "Pamela Lyndon Travers" and adopted the pen name P. L. Travers in 1933 while writing the ...
Go to Profile#3049
Lili Boulanger
1893 - 1918 (25 years)
Marie-Juliette Olga "Lili" Boulanger was a French composer and the first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize. Her older sister was the noted composer and composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.
Go to Profile#3050
Betty Compson
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
Betty Compson was an American actress and film producer who got her start during Hollywood's silent era. She is best known for her performances in The Docks of New York and The Barker, the latter of which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
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