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 people in Communications,
#7651
Aleksandra Przegalińska
#56316
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Aleksandra Katarzyna Przegalińska-Skierkowska is a Polish futurist. She is an associate professor of management and artificial intelligence as well as a vice-rector at Kozminski University. Life Przegalińska is a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and the Center for Collective Intelligence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also a visiting scholar at the Labor & Worklife Center at Harvard University.
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Lav Diaz
#93912
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Lavrente Indico Diaz is a Filipino independent filmmaker and former film critic. He is frequently known as one of the key members of the slow cinema movement, and has made several of the longest narrative films on record. Diaz is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary Filipino filmmakers.
Go to Profile#7653
Kōryō Miura
#41722
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Kōryō Miura is a Japanese astrophysicist, inventor, and origamist known for the Miura fold. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.
Go to Profile#7654
Niloofar Haeri
#124613
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Niloofar Haeri is an Iranian-American Islamic scholar, anthropologist and linguist. She is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, and the Program Chair in Islamic Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#7655
José Evangelista
#134239
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
José Evangelista was a Spanish composer and music educator who was based in Montreal, Canada. He was professor of composition at the Université de Montréal from 1979 to 2009. A member of the Canadian League of Composers, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, and an associate of the Canadian Music Centre, Evangelista was known for his commitment to contemporary classical music and non-Western music.
Go to Profile#7656
Jimmy Johnson
#82090
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jimmy Johnson is an American bass guitarist best known for his work with James Taylor, Allan Holdsworth, and Flim & the BB's. Raised in a rich musical environment, his father was a 47-year member of the Minnesota Orchestra's bass section, his mother a piano teacher and accompanist, and his brother Gordon is also a professional bassist.
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Del McCoury
#92280
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Delano Floyd McCoury is an American bluegrass musician. As leader of the Del McCoury Band, he plays guitar and sings lead vocals along with his two sons, Ronnie McCoury and Rob McCoury, who play mandolin and banjo respectively. In June 2010, he received a National Heritage Fellowship lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2011 he was elected into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#7658
A. Peter Bailey
#104378
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
A. Peter Bailey is an American journalist, author, and lecturer. He was an associate of Malcolm X's and a member of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Biography Alfonzo Peter Bailey was born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 24, 1938, and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama. He was in the U.S. Army from 1956 to 1959, and attended Howard University until 1961.
Go to Profile#7659
Shannon Jackson
#120717
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Department Chair of History of Art, and former Associate Vice Chancellor of the Arts and Design. She also serves as Program Director of the Kramlich Collection and Kramlich Art Foundation.
Go to Profile#7660
Maria Kliegel
#127625
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Maria Kliegel is a German cellist. Professional career Kliegel was born in Dillenburg, Hesse. She studied under Janos Starker starting at the age of 19. She won first prize at the American College Competition, First German Music Competition and Concours Aldo Parisot, and was also the Grand Prize winner at the second Mstislav Rostropovich International Cello Competition in 1981.
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Walter Payton
#149612
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Walter Payton, Jr. was an American jazz bassist and sousaphonist. Payton was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He played with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the French Market Jazz Hall Band and the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, and led his own group called the Snap Bean Band. His recording credits include Lee Dorsey's "Working in the Coal Mine", and Payton variously worked with Aaron Neville, Harry Connick Jr., Champion Jack Dupree and Chuck Carbo. Peyton appeared on Saturday Night Live .
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John Beck
#126652
Overall Influence
John Beck is an English musician and songwriter, best known for his role as a member of progressive rock/pop fusion band It Bites . Beck is a multi-instrumentalist, playing keyboards, accordion, guitar, bass guitar and drums: he is also a singer . Onstage and on record he almost entirely restricts himself to keyboards and vocals .
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Syl Johnson
#77836
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Sylvester Johnson was an American blues and soul singer, musician, songwriter and record producer. His most successful records included "Different Strokes" , "Is It Because I'm Black" and "Take Me to the River" .
Go to Profile#7664
Doc Cheatham
#105694
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Adolphus Anthony Cheatham, better known as Doc Cheatham , was an American jazz trumpeter, singer, and bandleader. He is also the grandfather of musician Theo Croker. Early life Doc Cheatham was born in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, of African, Cherokee and Choctaw heritage. He noted there was no jazz music there in his youth; like many in the United States he was introduced to the style by early recordings and touring groups at the end of the 1910s. Cheatham started playing music when he was 15, first on the cornet and soon after the trumpet, taking trumpet lessons from Fisk University professor N.
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Brian Tinsley
#87988
Overall Influence
Brian Tinsley is a physicist who for more than 60 years has been actively researching atmospheric and space physics. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas since 1976 and has served many national and international scientific organizations. He obtained his PhD from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in November, 1963, for research on optical emissions from the upper atmosphere . With his wife, Beatrice Tinsley, he came to Dallas to work at the newly formed Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, which became the University of Texas at Dallas in 1969. ...
Go to Profile#7666
Rajna Dragićević
#99892
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Rajna Dragićević, PhD, is a Serbian linguist, lexicologist and lexicographer. She is a full professor at the Faculty of Philology, the University of Belgrade, Serbia. Dragićević is the author of over 250 articles published in Serbian and international linguistic journals. She has published five books, Pridevi sa značenjem ljudskih osobina u savremenom srpskom jeziku , Leksikologija srpskog jezika , Verbalne asocijacije kroz srpski jezik i kulturu , Leksikologija i gramatika u skoli and Srpska leksika u prošlosti i danas. She collaborated in making of four dictionaries, Asocijativni rečnik sr...
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William Kraft
#129473
Overall Influence
1923 - 2022 (99 years)
William Kraft was an American composer, conductor, teacher, timpanist, and percussionist. Biography Early life and education Kraft was born in Chicago, Illinois. He was awarded two Anton Seidl Fellowships at Columbia University, graduating with a bachelor's degree cum laude in 1951 and a master's degree in 1954. He studied composition with Jack Beeson and Henry Cowell, orchestration with Henry Brant, percussion with Morris Goldenberg, timpani from Saul Goodman, and conducting with Rudolph Thomas and Fritz Zweig.
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Robert White
#160207
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Robert White is an American tenor and voice teacher who has had an active performance career for eight decades. If he is not better known to the general public, it is because his career, confined to art song and the concert stage, has not brought him the wider renown of singers who make their careers in opera; but he has long been cherished by connoisseurs of vocal music for the pure lyric sweetness of his voice and his scrupulous musicianship.
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Göran Söllscher
#144304
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Göran Söllscher is a Swedish award-winning virtuoso classical guitarist known for his broad range of musical interpretations, ranging from Bach to the Beatles. Söllscher's international career began during his years of education at the Royal Conservatory of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark when at the age of 23, he won the Concours International de Guitare in Paris, 1978. He was signed by German record label Deutsche Grammophon, the largest label featuring classical guitarists. As of 2005, Söllscher had released 19 records, which altogether have sold over a million copies.
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James Benning
#117957
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
James Benning is an American independent filmmaker and educator. Over the course of his 40-year career Benning has made over twenty-five feature-length films that have shown in many different venues across the world. Since 1987, he has taught at California Institute of the Arts . He is known as a minimalist filmmaker.
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Ali Shaheed Muhammad
#54091
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ali Shaheed Muhammad is an American hip hop DJ, record producer, and rapper, best known as a member of A Tribe Called Quest. With Q-Tip and Phife Dawg , the group released five studio albums from 1990 to 1998 before disbanding; their final album was released in 2016. A native of Brooklyn, New York, , Muhammad lived in Los Angeles.
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Victor Merzhanov
#150433
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Victor Karpovich Merzhanov was a Russian pianist and People's Artist of the USSR . Biography Merzhanov was born in Tambov and studied at Tambov Musical College with Solomon Starikov and Alexander Poltoratsky. Between 1936-1941 he studied at the Moscow Conservatory in the classes of Samuil Feinberg and Alexander Goedicke , graduating with distinction.
Go to Profile#7673
Tony Brown
#83162
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Tony Brown is an American record producer and pianist, known primarily for his work in country music. A former member of the Stamps Quartet and backing musician for Emmylou Harris, Brown has primarily worked as a producer since the late 1980s. He is known primarily for his production work with Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, and George Strait.
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György Sebők
#117422
Overall Influence
1922 - 1999 (77 years)
György Sebők was a Hungarian-born American pianist and professor at the Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana, United States. He was known worldwide as a soloist with major orchestras, a recitalist on four continents, a recording artist, and for his master classes, visiting professorships, and the Swiss music festival he organized in Ernen.
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Max Rudolf
#112663
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Max Rudolf was a German conductor and music institute teacher. Rudolf was born in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied cello, piano, organ and trumpet. He was a composition student of Bernhard Sekles at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. He held positions in Freiburg as assistant conductor at the Städtisches Theater, and as second conductor at the Hessisches Staatstheater in Darmstadt. In 1929, he became principal conductor of the German Theatre in Prague.
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Sheila Browne
#169448
Overall Influence
Sheila Browne is an American-Irish concert violist from Gladwyne, Pennsylvania with dual citizenship. She is a concert and recording artist and Associate Professor at the University of Delaware. For ten years she was on faculty and Associate Professor of Viola at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Named the William Primrose Recitalist of 2016 in conjunction with the Primrose International Viola Archive , Ms. Browne has played solo, concerto and chamber music concerts and has played principal of orchestras on six continents, performing in major venues in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.
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Matthew Kelly
#116654
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Matthew Kelly, also known as Matt Kelly, is an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He plays guitar and harmonica. Kelly is best known for being the leader of the rock band Kingfish, and for his association with Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead.
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Amaryllis Fleming
#118938
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Amaryllis Marie-Louise Fleming was a British cello performer and teacher. Early life and education Fleming was born in 1925, reportedly in Switzerland. She was born out of wedlock to the painter Augustus John and his mistress Eve Fleming, who was the mother of the writers Peter Fleming and Ian Fleming by her late husband. Most of her life she was raised as the adopted daughter of Eve Fleming as a pretence to hide the circumstances of her birth. The discovery of her true parentage only in 1949 when she was in her twenties "had a traumatic effect". Fleming was thus a niece to John's sister Gwen and aunt to actress Lucy Fleming.
Go to Profile#7679
Carita Paradis
#169201
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carita Paradis is a Swedish linguist, and Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lund University. Her research is focused on the dynamics of meaning-making in human communication. Within the framework of Cognitive Semantics, her works highlight the meaningful functioning of language in all its guises and all its uses when people communicate with one another. She is best known for her work on meanings related to degree, opposition and stance-taking in human communication. She has authored/co-authored and edited several books, including Degree Modifiers of Adjectives in Spoken British...
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Márta Kurtág
#137223
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Márta Kurtág was a Hungarian classical pianist and academic piano teacher. She was the wife of György Kurtág, with whom she performed for 60 years, including at international festivals. They often played from his collection Játékok, which they also recorded together.
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Joel Hirschhorn
#104110
Overall Influence
1937 - 2005 (68 years)
Joel Hirschhorn was an American songwriter. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Song on two occasions. He also wrote songs for a number of musicians, including Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. Hirschhorn was born in the Bronx and attended the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. After graduating, Hirschhorn became a regular performer on New York's nightclub circuit, both as a solo singer and as a member of the rock & roll band, The Highlighters.
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Pete Thomas
#129671
Overall Influence
Pete Thomas is a British music producer, TV and film composer, recording musician, and saxophonist. He was born in London and is based in Southampton, England. Career Thomas studied saxophone at Leeds College of Music, obtaining a first class diploma. He has worked as head of jazz and pop performance at University of Southampton, where he also taught saxophone and composition. He had one of his first professional gigs with Fats Domino. This led to working with Joe Jackson on his Jumpin' Jive album and world tours, as saxophonist and co-arranger. He composed music for Blue Ice featuring Michael Caine, Monkey Business for Meridian TV and American Kickboxer II.
Go to Profile#7683
Brett Dean
#103645
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Brett Dean is an Australian composer, violist and conductor. Early life Brett Dean was born, raised, and educated in Brisbane. He attended Brisbane State High School. He started learning violin at age 8, and later studied viola with Elizabeth Morgan and John Curro at the Queensland Conservatorium, where he graduated in 1982 with the Conservatorium Medal for the highest-achieving student of the year. In 1981 he was a prizewinner in the ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Awards.
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Avraham Heffner
#136562
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Avraham Heffner was an Israeli film and television director, screenwriter, author and Professor Emeritus at the Tel-Aviv University. He was a recipient of the Ophir Award for lifetime achievements. Biography Heffner served in the IDF with the Nahal Army Band. After his IDF service, he studied French literature at the Sorbonne, Paris. His love for the cinema began, according to him, at the age of 17. He began his career as an actor .
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Johan Rooryck
#147293
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Johan Rooryck is a Belgian linguist and a visiting professor at Leiden University where he was Professor of French Linguistics between 1993 and 2020. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Glossa and the former executive editor of Lingua . Rooryck is known for his works on generative grammar. He is the executive director of cOAlition S and is a recipient of Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship .
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Gunilla Florby
#114787
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Eva Gunilla Yvonne Florby , was a Swedish academic. She grew up in Malmö and received her Ph.D. at Lund University in 1982. She was an English literature professor, first in Lund and from 2002 until her retirement in 2010 at Gothenburg University. She is noted for her studies of the works of the Jacobean poet and playwright George Chapman.
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Bernard Tan
#114883
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Bernard Tan Tiong Gie is a Singaporean musician, composer, physicist and engineer. Early life and education Tan was educated at the Anglo-Chinese School, Singapore, the University of Singapore and Oxford University . He is a Chartered Engineer and Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers , Fellow of the Institute of Physics , Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Singapore, and Fellow of Trinity College of Music, London.
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Z. Randall Stroope
#119476
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Zane Randall Stroope is an American composer and conductor. He has published more than 190 works, with: Oxford University Press, Carl Fischer, Alliance Music Publishing, Walton, Colla Voce, and Lorenz.
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Jörg-Wolfgang Jahn
#163454
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Jörg-Wolfgang Jahn is a German violinist and music educator. Life Born in Saalfeld, Jahn studied violin in Cologne with Max Rostal. He also took chamber music lessons with Maurits Frank, Günter Kehr, János Starker and the members of the Quartetto Italiano. He also took part to the . In 1963, he received a first prize at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Prize .
Go to Profile#7690
Anton Coppola
#135163
Overall Influence
1917 - 2020 (103 years)
Antonio Francesco Coppola was an American opera conductor and composer. He was the uncle of film director Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, as well as the great-uncle of Nicolas Cage, Christopher Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Gian-Carlo Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Robert Schwartzman, and the younger brother of American composer and musician Carmine Coppola.
Go to Profile#7691
Tista Bagchi
#139712
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Tista Bagchi , Professor of Linguistics in the University of Delhi, is a distinguished Indian linguist and ethicist. Bagchi trained in Sanskrit College, Kolkata, the University of Delhi, and the University of Chicago, from where she obtained her PhD in Linguistics, her work spans issues of semantics and syntax in languages in general and South Asian languages in particular, questions of ethics in the application of medical technology and social interaction, and translations of iconic texts in Bangla literature and comparative philology. Bagchi has also been active in the area of cognitive scie...
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Steven Bernstein
#120988
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Steven Bernstein is an American trumpeter, slide trumpeter, arranger/composer and bandleader based in New York City. He is best known for his work in The Lounge Lizards, Sex Mob, Spanish Fly and the Millennial Territory Orchestra. Sex Mob's 2006 CD Sexotica was nominated for a Grammy.
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Louise Talma
#121522
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Louise Juliette Talma was an American composer, academic, and pianist. After studies in New York and in France, piano with Isidor Philipp and composition with Nadia Boulanger, she focused on composition from 1935. She taught at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, and at Hunter College. Her opera The Alcestiad was the first full-scale opera by an American woman staged in Europe. She was the first woman in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the first woman awarded the Sibelius Medal for Composition.
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Jonathan Manson
#170512
Overall Influence
Jonathan Manson is a Scottish cellist and viol player. Born in Edinburgh, he studied cello with Jane Cowan and later went on to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, where he studied with Steven Doane and Christel Thielmann. He studied viola da gamba with Wieland Kuijken in The Hague.
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Frans de Kok
#69233
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Frans de Kok was a Dutch musician. He taught himself to play the piano, the accordion and the bass. In the 1940s and 1950s, he played and arranged music for the Joe Andy Orchestra, which toured the Netherlands, West Germany and Switzerland with considerable success. From 1957 onwards, he worked in various capacities for Dutch television. In 1962, he was asked by TV host and singer Rudi Carrell to accompany his shows with a big orchestra. In the years after, de Kok wrote the arrangements for Carrell's shows and many more TV programmes. Moreover, he worked with a couple of famous Dutch artists in the recording studio, amongst others Boudewijn de Groot.
Go to Profile#7696
CP Lim
#131638
Overall Influence
CP Lim is an academic born in Malaysia. In his earlier years, he specialised in art and design. Between 1987 and 1999, he served as the Dean in the School of Design, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts . In the early 1970s, CP Lim became interested in oriental culture and astrology. CP Lim is an Associate Professor with the International Institute of Tao Philosophy and Yunnan University since 2004. He has had several titles published internationally.
Go to Profile#7697
Michael Obst
#122898
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael Obst is a German composer and pianist. Life Obst was born in Frankfurt am Main. He studied music education from 1973 to 1978 in Mainz, and from 1977 to 1982 studied piano with Alfons Kontarsky and Aloys Kontarsky at the Hochschule für Musik Köln, where he sat his piano examination in 1982. At the same time, between 1979 and 1986, he studied composition with Hans Ulrich Humpert in the Studio for Elektronic Music of the Hochschule für Musik Köln. From 1981 to 1992 he was the pianist and a founding member of the Ensemble Modern, from 1986 to 1989 he worked as an interpreter with Karlhe...
Go to Profile#7698
Haruki Kadokawa
#84781
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Haruki Kadokawa is a Japanese entrepreneur and filmmaker. He is the son of Genyoshi Kadokawa, the founder of the publishing company Kadokawa Shoten, and took over as president of the company in 1975 after his father's death. He entered the film industry as a producer and introduced a technique called media mix, which involved mass promotion and talent scouting for new artists in publishing, film, and television. In 1993, he was arrested for drug smuggling and resigned as president of Kadokawa Shoten, founding Kadokawa Haruki Corporation instead.
Go to Profile#7699
George Shirley
#113058
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
George Irving Shirley is an American operatic tenor, and was the first African-American tenor to perform a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Early life Shirley was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He earned a bachelor's degree in music education from Wayne State University in 1955 and then was drafted into the Army, where he became the first Black member of the United States Army Chorus. He was also the first African American hired to teach music in Detroit high schools.
Go to Profile#7700
Annette Badland
#98227
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Annette Badland is an English actress known for a wide range of roles on television, radio, stage, and film. She is best known for her roles as Charlotte in the BBC crime drama series Bergerac, Margaret Blaine in the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, Mrs. Glenna Fitzgibbons in the first season of Outlander, Babe Smith in the BBC soap opera EastEnders, and as Dr. Fleur Perkins on the ITV mystery series Midsomer Murders. She was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1993 for her performance as Sadie in Jim Cartwright's play The Rise and Fall of L...
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