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,
#3201
Nadia Reisenberg
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Nadia Reisenberg Sherman was an American pianist of Lithuanian birth. Biography Nadia Reisenberg was born in Vilnius to a Jewish family. Her parents were Aaron and Rachel Reisenberg. Her sister Anna was born two years later, and Clara in 1911 who later took the married name of Clara Rockmore and became renowned for her virtuosity on the theremin. The three sisters remained extremely close. When Nadia was six, her uncle Paul sent the family a piano, and Nadia immediately knew she would be at the keyboard for the rest of her life. Her talent demanded that the family move to St. Petersburg for ...
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Alice Blinn
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Alice Blinn was an American educator, home efficiency expert, and magazine editor. Born in Candor, New York, she attended the New York State normal school and became a teacher. After teaching briefly, in 1913, she entered Cornell University and earned a degree in Domestic Science. While in school, she founded and managed the Cornell Women's Review. After graduation in 1917, she became a food conservation demonstrator for the New York Extension Service and then returned after a year to teach and manage the publications office for the Extension Service at Cornell.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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Chung Chil-sung
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Chung Chil-sung , also known by her pen name Geumjuk , was a Korean dancer, feminist, and independence activist. Biography She was born in Daegu province, one of twenty three provinces of the Joseon kingdom. It was said that she came from a poor family. Her exact birth year is questioned often as others say she was born in 1902, 1905, and 1908, but others say that 1897 seems to be more appropriate. There are no details about her childhood or her family clan.
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Marie Tempest
1864 - 1942 (78 years)
Dame Mary Susan Etherington, , known professionally as Marie Tempest, was an English singer and actress. Tempest became a famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere. She was, at times, her own theatre manager during a career spanning 55 years. She was also instrumental in the founding of the actors' union Equity in Britain.
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Lillian Russell
1860 - 1922 (62 years)
Lillian Russell was an American actress and singer. She became one of the most famous actresses and singers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, praised for her beauty and style, as well as for her voice and stage presence; a reviewer referred to her as "the most beautiful actress of the legitimate stage."
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Maria Ivogün
1891 - 1987 (96 years)
Maria Ivogün was a distinguished soprano singer of Hungarian origin. She was an especially outstanding interpreter of the works of Mozart: her recording of the aria of the Queen of the Night became legendary.
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Judy Holliday
1921 - 1965 (44 years)
Judy Holliday was an American actress, comedian and singer. She began her career as part of a nightclub act before working in Broadway plays and musicals. Her success as Billie Dawn in the 1946 stage production of Born Yesterday led to her being cast in the 1950 film version for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. She was known for her performance on Broadway in the musical Bells Are Ringing, winning a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical and reprising her role in the 1960 fi...
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Margarita Bertheau
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
Margarita Bertheau Odio was a Costa Rican painter and cultural promoter. The Costa Rican Art Museum states she is said to be known for "landscapes, portraits, watercolor figures, and her geometric, surrealistic and abstract work." She has been called the first female Watercolor painting artist of her country. She had independent views and was contemporary with the first wave of Costa Rican artists that included Dinora Bolandi, Lola Fernandez and Sonia Romero. These four are said to have taught fine art at the University of Costa Rica and to have created the second generation of Costa Rican wo...
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Josephine Lucchese
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Josephine Lucchese was an American operatic soprano who had an active international singing career during the 1920s and 1930s. A skilled coloratura soprano, she was particularly admired for her portrayals of Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Violetta in La traviata, and the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor. She began her opera career in 1920 with the San Carlo Opera Company; a touring opera company in the United States. She was a resident artist with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company from 1929 to 1932, and was a principal artist with the Dutch National Opera during the 1930s. She also appe...
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Barbara Bedford
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Barbara Bedford was an American actress who appeared in dozens of silent movies. Her career declined after the introduction of sound, but she continued to appear in small roles until 1945. Early life Barbara Bedford was born Violet May Rose on July 19, 1903, the first child to Robert William Rose, a Scottish-American interior decorator, and Barbara Rose , who was a first generation Czech-American. She had a brother, William Rose. The 1910 census lists the family as living in Denver, Colorado.
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Olga Samaroff
1880 - 1948 (68 years)
Olga Samaroff was an American pianist, music critic, and teacher. Among her teachers was Charles-Valentin Alkan's son, Élie-Miriam Delaborde. Her second husband was the conductor Leopold Stokowski.
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Lula Mysz-Gmeiner
1876 - 1948 (72 years)
Lula Mysz-Gmeiner was a German concert contralto and mezzo-soprano born in Transylvania, who performed lieder recitals in Europe and the United States. She was an academic voice teacher in Berlin and taught both Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Peter Anders.
Go to Profile#3214
Valeria Barsova
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Valeria Vladimirovna Barsova , PAU, was a Russian operatic soprano, one of the leading lyric-coloratura sopranos of the first half of the 20th century in Russia. Life and career Valeria Barsova first studied the piano with Estonian composer Artur Kapp. She then studied singing at the Moscow Conservatory with Mazetti. In 1915, she was singing in a Moscow cabaret when she was noticed by Sergei Zimin, director of the Zimin Opera, where she made her operatic debut in 1917, as Gilda in Rigoletto. Other roles at this theatre included; Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Constance in Die Entführung aus de...
Go to Profile#3215
Millicent Silver
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Millicent Irene Silver was an English harpsichordist, who began her career as a pianist and violinist. Early life Born in South London, her father, James Brand Silver, was a violinist and oboist, and had been a boy chorister at St. George's Chapel, Windsor where his singing attracted the attention of Queen Victoria. Her mother Amelia Argyle Silver was a piano teacher. Millicent was the second of four children. Her musical talent was discovered at the age of three, when she imitated her elder brother's practising.
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Caroline Hatchard
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Caroline Gertrude Hatchard was a British lyric soprano, musical theatre and opera singer of the 20th-century who was the first English-born and trained soprano to be engaged by the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden where she played Sophie in the British premiere of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier on 29 January 1913 with Thomas Beecham conducting.
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Elena Beckman-Shcherbina
1881 - 1951 (70 years)
Elena Aleksandrovna Bekman-Shcherbina was a Soviet and Russian pianist, composer and teacher. Origins Born Elena Aleksandrovna Kamentseva, she was adopted by her mother's sister after the death of her mother. In gratitude, she took her adoptive mother's surname, Shcherbina.
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Clytie Hine
1887 - 1983 (96 years)
Clytie May Hine, was an Australian-born operatic soprano who became a renowned voice teacher in New York. Biography Clytie Hine was an only child, born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1887 to William Henry Hine, a jeweller and Mary McDonald. At age 16, having studied piano privately since age 7, she commenced studies with Bryceson Treharne at the Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide. Her voice studies were under Frederick Bevan. She graduated AMUA in 1908 and the following year travelled to London to study under Medora Henson at the Royal College of Music. On the strength of her pe...
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Joy Boughton
1913 - 1963 (50 years)
Christina Joyance Boughton was an English oboist and the daughter of composer Rutland Boughton and artist Christina Walshe. She died in 1963 in tragic circumstances.. She was taught oboe by Léon Goossens and attended the Royal College of Music from 1929 to 1937 at which, for a short while before her death, she was a professor of Oboe. She helped establish Benjamin Britten's English Opera Group, being a member of its orchestra in the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1951 Britten dedicated his Six Metamorphoses after Ovid to Joy, which she premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival on 14 June that year. Toge...
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Ilona Kabos
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Ilona Kabos was a Hungarian-British pianist and teacher. Biography Kabos was born in Budapest in 1893 . She studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music under Árpád Szendy , Leo Weiner and Zoltán Kodály
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Kathleen Parlow
1890 - 1963 (73 years)
Kathleen Parlow was a violinist known for her outstanding technique, which earned her the nickname "The lady of the golden bow". Although she left Canada at the age of four and did not permanently return until 1940, Parlow was sometimes billed as "The Canadian Violinist".
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Helen Lemmens-Sherrington
1834 - 1906 (72 years)
Helen Lemmens-Sherrington was an English concert and operatic soprano prominent from the 1850s to the 1880s. Born in northern England, she spent much of her childhood and later life in Belgium, where she studied at the Brussels Conservatory. After engagements in mainland Europe she made her London debut in 1856. Her singing career was mostly in concert, but in the first half of the 1860s she appeared in opera at Covent Garden and other leading London theatres.
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Edith Weiss-Mann
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
German harpsichordist, musicologist, and teacher Edith Weiss-Mann was born in Hamburg to businessman Emil Weiss and his wife Hermine Rosenfeld Weiss. She studied at Hamburg's Hochschule für Musik from 1900 to 1904. In 1905, she continued her studies privately with James Kwast, Carl Friedberg, Jose Vianna da Motta, and Bruno Eisner. After meeting harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, Weiss-Mann began to concentrate on the harpsichord and early music.
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Marie Sundelius
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Marie Sundelius was a Swedish-American classical soprano. She sang for many years with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and later embarked on a second career as a celebrated voice teacher in Boston.
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Carroll Glenn
1918 - 1983 (65 years)
Elizabeth Carroll Glenn was an American violinist and music educator. Early years Glenn was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1918. She began studying violin under her mother’s guidance when she was four and continued her studies in Columbia, South Carolina, with Felice de Horvath, who, at the time was teaching at the University of South Carolina. At age 11, Glenn moved to New York to study with Edouard Déthier at the Juilliard School through a cooperative program with the New Lincoln School, an experimental K-12 program operated by Teachers College, Columbia University. She graduated from Jui...
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Jane Froman
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Ellen Jane Froman was an American actress and singer. During her thirty-year career, she performed on stage, radio, and television despite chronic health problems due to injuries sustained in a 1943 plane crash.
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Aglaja Orgeni
1841 - 1926 (85 years)
Aglaja Orgeni , was a Hungarian coloratura soprano. Biography Orgeni was born in Rimászombat, Galicia . She studied with Pauline Viardot in Baden-Baden and Mathilde Marchesi. She became a member of the Hofoper Berlin , making her debut as Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula. In 1866, she performed at Covent Garden singing Violetta in Verdi's La traviata and the title roles in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Friedrich von Flotow's Martha.
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Branka Musulin
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Branka Musulin was a German-Croatian classical pianist and teacher. Life Musulin was born in Croatia in Zagreb. As from the age of eight, she studied with celebrated Croatian pianist Svetislav Stančić in Zagreb and played in public at that time. After her concert diploma, she travelled to Paris in 1936 to study with Alfred Cortot and Yvonne Lefébure. As from 1938, she studied with Alfredo Casella in Siena and after 1941 with Max von Pauer in South Germany .
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Mirta Aguirre
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Mirta Aguirre Carreras was a Cuban poet, novelist, journalist and political activist from the LGBTQI movement. She has been called "the most important female academic and woman of letters in post-revolutionary Cuba".
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Carrie Tubb
1876 - 1976 (100 years)
Caroline Elizabeth Tubb was an English soprano of the early 20th century, and later a teacher of singing at the Guildhall School of Music. She made her debut at London's Royal Opera House in 1910, where she appeared in such works as Elektra and Hänsel und Gretel. With Thomas Beecham's opera company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she sang in Die Fledermaus, The Marriage of Figaro and The Tales of Hoffmann. Later, she mostly appeared on the concert platform, including at 54 Prom concerts and at the major British music festivals. She also made some early recordings. Around 1930 she retired from singing and began teaching.
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Gene Gauntier
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Gene Gauntier was an American screenwriter and actress who was one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry. A writer, director, and actress in films from mid 1906 to 1920, she wrote screenplays for 42 films. She performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother .
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Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová was a Czechoslovak concert pianist and piano teacher, a professor at the Prague Academy of Arts. Her students included Ivan Moravec. Ilona Štěpánová-Kurzová was the mother of pianist Pavel Štěpán.
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Frances James
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Frances James was a Canadian soprano who specialized in concert repertoire. She worked prolifically as a performer on CBC Radio and as a recitalist from the late 1920s through the 1950s; premiering works by numerous Canadian composers of note and championing works by contemporary international composers. Her performances were noted for their musical intelligence and sophistication. Her singing was admired by several important composers, including Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, and Darius Milhaud. While her performances, both live and on radio/disc, were mainly from the concert repertoire, ...
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Mary Elizabeth Turner Salter
1856 - 1938 (82 years)
Mary Elizabeth Turner Salter was an American soprano and composer. She was born in Peoria, Illinois, the daughter of Jonathan and Mary E. Hinds Turner. Turner graduated from Burlington High School in Burlington, Iowa, and the Boston College of Music, and then worked as a voice teacher at Wellesley College and performed in churches. In 1881 she married Sumner Salter. She died in Orangeburg, New York. She was one of the founding members of the American Society of Women Composers.
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Charlotte Burton
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
Charlotte E. Burton was an American silent film actress. Biography Early life and education Charlotte E. Burton was born on May 30, 1881, in San Francisco, California. However there is some debate on her date of birth; some sources state she was born ten years later, on May 30, 1891; and other sources state she died at age 48 .
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Anna Granville Hatcher
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Anna Granville Hatcher was an American linguist. She started her career as a Romance linguist, and later conducted research in medieval literature as well as branching out from Late Latin and Old French to studies on Provençal, Spanish, Italian, English, and German. She was the first woman to hold the position of full professor at Johns Hopkins University.
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Helen Hopekirk
1856 - 1945 (89 years)
Helen Hopekirk was a Scottish pianist and composer who lived and worked in Boston. Life and career Helen Hopekirk was born in Portobello, Edinburgh in Scotland, a daughter of music shop owners Adam and Helen Hopekirk. She studied music with George Lichtenstein and Scottish composer Alexander Mackenzie, and made her debut as a soloist in 1874 with the Edinburgh Amateur Orchestral Society. After other successful performances and the death of her father, she relocated to study composition with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig. After successful debuts in Leipzig and London, she began regular concert to...
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Lola Gjoka
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Lola Gjoka Aleksi was an Albanian pianist during the period of the Communist regime. Life Gjoka was born in Sevastopol in 1910, into an Albanian family. She began learning the piano at the age of six, and her success was such that her father arranged for her to have lessons from the pianist Karalovy. In 1932 her family moved to Korçë, where Gjoka worked as an accompanist for singers including the soprano Tefta Tashko-Koço, the Albanian folk singer Marie Kraja, and Mihal Ciko.
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Luella Gear
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Luella Gear was an American actress. She appeared in numerous films, TV series and theatrical productions throughout the 1910s to the 1960s Early life Gear was born in New York in 1897. She attended the Spence School and was educated in Brussels, Belgium.
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Fanny Arthur Robinson
1831 - 1879 (48 years)
Fanny Arthur Robinson was an English pianist, music educator and composer who spent most of her career in Dublin, Ireland. Biography Fanny Robinson was born in Southampton and studied the piano in London with William Sterndale Bennett and Sigismund Thalberg. She performed in Dublin in February 1849 where she met her future husband Joseph Robinson, conductor, composer and chorister at St. Patrick's Cathedral. They married on 17 July 1849. She appeared as a pianist in London and Paris, and in 1856 made her performing debut in Ireland. She took a teaching position at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in the same year.
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Judith Raskin
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Judith Raskin was an American lyric soprano, renowned for her fine voice as well as her acting. Life and work Raskin was born in New York to Harry A. Raskin, a high school music teacher, and Lillian Raskin, a grade school teacher. Her father aroused her childhood interest in music, leading her to study violin and piano, before she turned her focus to singing. In 1945, she graduated from Roosevelt High School, Yonkers and attended Smith College, where she majored in music. It was during her college years that she began taking singing lessons, which she continued after graduation in order to...
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Julia Perry
1924 - 1979 (55 years)
Julia Amanda Perry was an American classical composer and teacher who combined European classical and neo-classical training with her African-American heritage. Life and education Born in Lexington, Kentucky, as a child Perry moved with her family to Akron, Ohio. She went on to study voice, piano, and composition at the Westminster Choir College 1943–48. It was there that she received her B.M. and M.M. She continued on to her graduate studies at Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, where she was a student of Luigi Dallapiccola, and then later studied at the Juilliard School of Music. Around...
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Liane Haid
1895 - 2000 (105 years)
Juliane "Liane" Haid was an Austrian actress and singer. She has often been referred to as Austria's first movie star. Biography Juliane Haid was born in Vienna on 16 August 1895, the first child to Georg Haid and Juliane Haid . She had two younger sisters, Grit, who also became an actress, and Johanna .
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Winifred Copperwheat
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Winifred May Copperwheat was an English classical viola player and teacher. She studied under English violist Lionel Tertis at the Royal Academy of Music. Tertis later said after one of her recitals, that she had "played like an angel".
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Tosca Kramer
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Tosca Berger Kramer was a New Zealand-born American violinist and violist. Kramer, along with her parents, was instrumental in bringing classical music performance and instruction to the state of Oklahoma.
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Annelies Kupper
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
Annelies Kupper , was a German operatic soprano, particularly associated with Mozart and the German repertory. Kupper was born at Glatz in Lower Silesia. She studied in Breslau and was a music teacher there before making her operatic debut in 1935. She then appeared in Schwerin , Weimar , Hamburg , Munich . She sang Eva in Die Meistersinger at the Bayreuth festival, in 1944, and returned as Elsa in Lohengrin in 1960. She created Danae in Richard Strauss's Die Liebe der Danae at the Salzburg festival, in 1952.
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Myrna Sharlow
1893 - 1952 (59 years)
Myrna Docia Sharlow was an American soprano who had an active performance career in operas and concerts during the 1910s through the 1930s. She began her career in 1912 with the Boston Opera Company and became one of Chicago's more active sopranos from 1915–1920, and again in 1923–1924 and 1926–1927. She sang with several other important American opera companies during her career, including one season at the Metropolitan Opera. She made only a handful of opera appearances in Europe during her career, most notably singing in the English premiere of Riccardo Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini at Covent Garden in 1914.
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Ania Dorfmann
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Ania Dorfmann was a Russian-American pianist and teacher, who taught at the Juilliard School in New York for many years and was the first of only a very few women pianists to play or record under Arturo Toscanini.
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Rosina Buckman
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Rosina Buckman was a New Zealand soprano who became a prima donna during World War I and later a professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music. She was born in Blenheim, grew up mostly in the North Island and went to England when still a teenager to get a formal singing education from Charles Swinnerton Heap. After Heap's death, she moved to the Birmingham School of Music. Graduating in 1903, she could immediately sustain herself from singing engagements but fell ill and returned to New Zealand the following year. She advanced her career in the country of her birth and had her operatic debut in 1905.
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Miriam Bernstein-Cohen
1895 - 1991 (96 years)
Miriam Bernstein-Cohen , 1895–1991, was an Israeli actress, director, poet and translator. Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was born in Kishinev, Russian Empire. Her father was the doctor and community activist Jacob Bernstein-Kogan. She grew up in Kharkov. After training as a medical doctor she enrolled in drama school. She studied with Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow in 1918 before returning to Moldova as an actress, where she worked under the name Maria Alexandrova.
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