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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#18451
Edwin H. Colbert
#18462
Overall Influence
1905 - 2001 (96 years)
Edwin Harris "Ned" Colbert was a distinguished American vertebrate paleontologist and prolific researcher and author. Born in Clarinda, Iowa, he grew up in Maryville, Missouri and graduated from Maryville High School. His father was George H. Colbert who was head of the mathematics department at Northwest Missouri State University and had been at the college since its founding in 1906.
Go to Profile#18452
Tracy Chou
#18463
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Tracy Chou is a software engineer and advocate for diversity in technology related fields. She previously worked at Pinterest and Quora with internship experience at Rocket Fuel, Google, and Facebook.
Go to Profile#18453
Cesare Prandelli
#18464
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Claudio Cesare Prandelli is an Italian football coach and former player. He was most recently head coach of Fiorentina. Career Player Prandelli was a midfielder who moved from Atalanta to Juventus in 1979. His first game for Juventus was in the 1979–80 European Cup Winners' Cup against Raba ETO Győr. He played six seasons with Juventus, with his final game in the 1984–85 Coppa Italia against Milan.
Go to Profile#18454
Mahan Mj
#18465
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Mahan Mj , also known as Mahan Maharaj and Swami Vidyanathananda, is an Indian mathematician and monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. He is a recipient of the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in mathematical sciences and the Infosys Prize 2015 for Mathematical Sciences. He is best known for his work in hyperbolic geometry, geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology and complex geometry.
Go to Profile#18455
Luis Suárez Fernández
#18466
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Luis Suárez Fernández is a Spanish historian, originally a medievalist, who has extended his studies to include modern and recent history. He belongs to a line of Spanish historians that are in full agreement with Francoism and by some is named a revisionist. He carries the same name as Uruguayan football player Luis Suarez
Go to Profile#18456
Dirk Bogarde
#18467
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Sir Dirk Bogarde was an English actor, novelist and screenwriter. Initially a matinée idol in films such as Doctor in the House for the Rank Organisation, he later acted in art house films, evolving from "heartthrob to icon of edginess".
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Andy Hamilton
#18468
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Andrew Kevin Hamilton is a British tenor saxophonist who has played with Duran Duran, Wham!, Elton John, Pet Shop Boys, Tina Turner, George Michael, Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Bon Jovi, David Bowie, Ben E. King, Dexy's Midnight Runners, Brian May, Stereophonics and more.
Go to Profile#18458
Kristofer Schipper
#18469
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Kristofer Marinus Schipper , also known as Rik Schipper and by his Chinese name Shi Zhouren , was a Dutch sinologist. He was a professor of Oriental studies at Leiden University, appointed there in 1993. Schipper worked as researcher for École française d'Extrême-Orient and later taught as directeur de recherche in History of Daoism studies at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. He was head of the Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises from the Collège de France. He also taught at Fuzhou University and Zhangzhou College. After his retirement, he and his wife Yuan Bingling moved to Fuz...
Go to Profile#18459
Elisabeth Mann Borgese
#18470
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Elisabeth Veronika Mann Borgese, was an internationally recognized expert on maritime law and policy and the protection of the environment. Called "the mother of the oceans", she received the Order of Canada and awards from the governments of Austria, China, Colombia, Germany, the United Nations and the World Conservation Union.
Go to Profile#18460
Jean-Daniel Nicoud
#18471
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Jean-Daniel Nicoud , is a Swiss computer scientist, noted for inventing of a computer mouse with an optical encoder and the CALM . He obtained a degree in physics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 1963. Around 1965, he became interested in logical systems. He obtained his PhD at the EPFL in 1970 and became a professor in 1973.
Go to Profile#18461
Peter Morici
#18472
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peter George Morici Jr. is an American economist and Professor Emeritus of International Business at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a graduate of SUNY Albany in New York State, where he received his Ph.D in economics in 1974. He is a nationally syndicated columnist, with his articles appearing in publications such as The Washington Times, The Hill, Townhall.com, and Newsmax. Morici has appeared as a guest on Newsmax TV and Fox News Channel.
Go to Profile#18462
Touraj Daryaee
#18473
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Touraj Daryaee is an Iranian Iranologist and historian. He currently works as the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and Culture and the director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Go to Profile#18463
John Wansbrough
#18474
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
John Edward Wansbrough was an American historian and professor who taught at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies , where he was vice chancellor from 1985 to 1992. Wansbrough is credited with founding the so-called Revisionist school of Islamic studies through his fundamental criticism of the historical credibility of the Quran and other early Islamic texts, especially regarding the classical Islamic narratives concerning the early history of Islam and his attempt to develop an alternative, historically more credible version of Islam's beginnings. He argued in gen...
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Gabriel Camps
#18475
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Gabriel Camps was a French archaeologist and social anthropologist, the founder of the Encyclopédie berbère and is considered a prestigious scholar on the history of the Berber people. Biography Gabriel Camps was born in Misserghin, French Algeria. He attended secondary school in Oran, and studied later in Algiers. In 1961, he graduated from Algiers University with a PhD thesis about the protohistorical monuments and burial rites of Berber people, called Aux origines de la Berbérie. Monuments et rites funéraires protohistoriques, as well as with a second thesis on the Numidian king Masinissa.
Go to Profile#18465
Ian Plimer
#18476
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist and professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne. He rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He has been criticised by climate scientists for misinterpreting data and spreading misinformation.
Go to Profile#18466
Radhika Ramana Dasa
#18477
Overall Influence
#18467
RedOne
#18478
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Nadir Khayat , known professionally as RedOne, is a Moroccan singer, songwriter, record producer, and record executive. Currently he holds the FIFA's Creative Entertainment Executive position. RedOne is considered one of the most influential record producer artists in contemporary music. As a record producer and songwriter, he has worked with many worldwide high-profile recording artists, most notably Ava Max, Lady Gaga, Akon, Michael Jackson, RBD, Now United, U2, Nicki Minaj, Jennifer Lopez, Nicole Scherzinger, Gru, Cross Gene, MIKA, Pitbull, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira, Wyclef Jean, Mariah Car...
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Shelley Correll
#18479
Overall Influence
Shelley Joyce Correll is an American sociologist. She is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Women’s Leadership Director at Stanford University. Early life and education Correll was born and raised in Houston, Texas, to a police officer father and stay-at-home mother, neither of whom went to college. Growing up, her family was big fans of the Houston Astros and she saw games played in the Astrodome. Upon earning her Bachelor of Arts degree from Texas A&M University, Correll became a high school chemistry teacher while also interning at Dow Chemical Company and taking master’s levels classes in sociology at the University of Houston.
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Howard Waldrop
#18480
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Howard Waldrop is a science fiction author who works primarily in short fiction. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2021. Personal life Though born in Houston, Mississippi, Waldrop has spent most of his life in Texas. He moved to Washington state for several years, but has since returned to Austin. As a child, he corresponded with Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin about their shared love of comic books. He is an avid fly fisherman. He is a member of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop, has attended the Rio Hondo Writing Workshop, and has taught at the Clarion Wo...
Go to Profile#18470
Étienne Klein
#18481
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Étienne Klein is a French physicist and philosopher of science, born in 1958. A graduate of École Centrale Paris, he holds a DEA in theoretical physics, as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy of science and an accreditation to supervise research .
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Bart Selman
#18482
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Bart Selman is a Dutch-American professor of computer science at Cornell University. He has previously worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He is also co-founder and principal investigator of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Berkeley artificial intelligence expert Stuart J. Russell, and co-chair of the Computing Community Consortium's 20-year roadmap for AI research.
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I-Chen Wu
#18483
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
I-Chen Wu is a professor at Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University. He received his B.S. in Electronic Engineering from National Taiwan University , M.S. in computer science from NTU, and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University, in 1982, 1984 and 1993, respectively.
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Francesco Boldizzoni
#18484
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Francesco Boldizzoni is an Italian academic and historian. He is currently a professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, having previously taught at the University of Turin and the University of Helsinki, and held research positions at Clare Hall, Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.
Go to Profile#18474
Christopher Soghoian
#18485
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Christopher Soghoian is a privacy researcher and activist. He is currently working for Senator Ron Wyden as the senator’s Senior Advisor for Privacy & Cybersecurity. From 2012 to 2016, he was the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.
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Joseph W. Goodman
#18486
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Joseph Wilfred Goodman is an engineer and physicist. Education Goodman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in engineering and applied physics from Harvard University in 1958 and Master of Science and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1960 and 1963, respectively.
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Yurii Mitropolskiy
#18487
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Yurii Oleksiyovych Mitropolskiy was a renowned Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician known for his contributions to the fields of dynamical systems and nonlinear oscillations. He was born in Poltava Governorate and died in Kyiv.
Go to Profile#18477
Aleksandar Vučić
#18488
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Aleksandar Vučić is a Serbian politician serving as the president of Serbia since 2017. A member of the Serbian Progressive Party , he previously served as the president of the SNS from 2012 to 2023, first deputy prime minister from 2012 to 2014, and prime minister of Serbia from 2014 to 2017.
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William Witney
#18489
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
William Nuelsen Witney was an American film and television director. He is best remembered for the action films he made for Republic Pictures, particularly serials: Dick Tracy Returns, G-Men vs. the Black Dragon, Daredevils of the Red Circle, Zorro's Fighting Legion, and Drums of Fu Manchu. Prolific and pugnacious, Witney began directing while still in his 20s, and continued working until 1982.
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Markus Fierz
#18490
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Markus Eduard Fierz was a Swiss physicist, particularly remembered for his formulation of spin–statistics theorem, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 1979 and the Albert Einstein Medal in 1989 for all his work.
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Andrew Hurley
#18491
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Andrew Hurley is primarily known as an English translator of Spanish literature, having translated a variety of authors, most notably the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. He has published over 30 book-length translations.
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Susan Carland
#18492
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Susan Janet Carland is an Australian academic, author and television presenter best known for her ongoing media presence speaking on her academic speciality of women in Islam. Early life and education Carland grew up in Forest Hill in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. She attended public schools. She has stated that one of her favourite recreational pursuits in childhood was ballet, which she pursued from the age of seven.
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Myron Tribus
#18493
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Myron T. Tribus was an American organizational theorist, who was the director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at MIT from 1974 to 1986. He was known as leading supporter and interpreter of W. Edwards Deming, for popularizing the Bayesian methods, and for coining the term "thermoeconomics".
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Michael S. Engel
#18494
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Michael S. Engel, FLS, FRES is an American paleontologist and entomologist, notable for contributions to insect evolutionary biology and classification. In connection with his studies he has undertaken field expeditions in Central Asia, Asia Minor, the Levant, Arabia, eastern Africa, the high Arctic, and South and North America, and has published more than 925 papers in scientific journals and over 1000 new living and fossil species. Some of Engel's research images were included in exhibitions on the aesthetic value of scientific imagery.
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Hikaru Utada
#18495
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
, who is also known by the mononym Utada, is a Japanese-American pop singer, songwriter and producer. Utada has become one of the most influential and best-selling musical artists in Japan. Born in the United States to Japanese parents, record producer Teruzane Utada and singer Keiko Fuji, Utada began to write music and lyrics at an early age and often traveled to Tokyo as a result of her father's job. Eventually, a recording contract with Toshiba-EMI was signed. Under the stage name Cubic U, she released an English-language debut album Precious in early 1998, but it was a commercial failure.
Go to Profile#18485
Gustavo Kuerten
#18496
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Gustavo "Guga" Kuerten is a Brazilian former world No. 1 tennis player. He won the French Open singles title three times , and was the Tennis Masters Cup champion in 2000. During his career he won 20 singles and 8 doubles titles.Kuerten suffered many problems with injuries which resulted in his non-attendances at many tournaments in 2002 and between 2004 and 2008. After two hip surgeries and a few failed attempted comebacks, he retired from top-level tennis in May 2008. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2012.In 2016, Kuerten was asked to be a torch bearer for the ...
Go to Profile#18486
Jürg Fröhlich
#18497
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jürg Martin Fröhlich is a Swiss mathematician and theoretical physicist. He is best known for introducing rigorous techniques for the analysis of statistical mechanics models, in particular continuous symmetry breaking , and for pioneering the study of topological phases of matter using low-energy effective field theories.
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Barry Schwartz
#18498
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Barry Schwartz is an American psychologist. Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College and since 2016 has been visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the intersection of psychology and economics. He frequently publishes editorials in The New York Times, applying his research in psychology to current events. Schwartz's research addresses morality, decision-making and the inter-relationships between behavioral science and society. His books criticize certain philosophical roots of Western societies and expose underlying myths common in both lay and academic psychological theories.
Go to Profile#18488
Chung-Yao Chao
#18499
Overall Influence
1902 - 1998 (96 years)
Chung-Yao Chao was a Chinese theoretical physicist. He studied the scattering of gamma rays in lead by pair production in 1930, without knowing that positrons were involved in the anomalously high scattering cross-section. When the positron was discovered by Carl David Anderson in 1932, confirming the existence of Paul Dirac's "antimatter", it became clear that positrons could explain Chung-Yao Chao's earlier experiments, with the gamma rays being emitted from electron-positron annihilation.
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Neil Gillman
#18500
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Neil Gillman was a Canadian-American rabbi and philosopher affiliated with Conservative Judaism. Biography Gillman was born in Quebec City, Canada. He graduated from McGill University in 1954. He was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1960. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1975.
Go to Profile#18490
Rajesh Khanna
#18501
Overall Influence
1942 - 2012 (70 years)
Rajesh Khanna was an Indian actor, film producer and politician who worked in Hindi films. Considered as one of the greatest and most successful actors in the history of Indian cinema, he is known as the First Superstar of Indian cinema. He has consecutively starred in a record 15 solo hero successful films between 1969 and 1971. He was the highest-paid actor in Hindi cinema throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His accolades include five Filmfare Awards, and in 2013, he was posthumously awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour.
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Giovanni Peri
#18502
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Giovanni Peri is an Italian-born American economist who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis, where he directs the Global Migration Center. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the co-editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of the European Economic Association. He is known for his research on the economic impact of immigration to the United States. He has also researched the economic determinants of international migrations and the Economic impact of immigration in several European Countries. He has...
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Norman Daniels
#18503
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Norman Daniels is an American political philosopher and philosopher of science, political theorist, ethicist, and bioethicist at Harvard University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before his career at Harvard, Daniels had built his career as a medical ethicist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and at Tufts University School of Medicine, also in Boston. He also developed the concept of accountability for reasonableness with James Sabin, an ethics framework used to challenge the healthcare resource allocation in the 1990s.
Go to Profile#18493
Cheryl Clarke
#18504
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Cheryl L. Clarke is an American lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist who continues to dedicate her life to the recognition and advancement of Black and Queer people. Her scholarship focuses on African-American women's literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement in the United States. For over 40 years, Cheryl Clarke worked at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and maintains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, though retired. In addition, Clarke serves on the board of the Newark Pride Alliance.
Go to Profile#18494
Jacob Golomb
#18505
Overall Influence
1947 - 2023 (76 years)
Jacob Golomb was an Israeli philosopher. He was professor of philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Golomb specialised in continental philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature; Philosophy of Zionism and Jewish modern philosophy. Professor Golomb was acting as the Philosophical Editor of the Hebrew University Magnes Press and was a member of its academic committee.
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Manfred W. Padberg
#18506
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Manfred Wilhelm Padberg was a German mathematician who worked with linear and combinatorial optimization. He and Ellis L. Johnson won the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 2000. Biography Padberg grew up in Zagreb, Croatia, and Westphalia. From 1961 he studied mathematics at the University of Münster, where he graduated in 1967. In 1967, he was a research assistant at the University of Mannheim. Starting in September 1968, he studied at Carnegie Mellon University, where he obtained a master's degree and his Ph.D. in Industrial Administration. His advisor was Egon Balas and his dissertation wa...
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Dorrit Hoffleit
#18507
Overall Influence
1907 - 2007 (100 years)
Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit was an American senior research astronomer at Yale University. She is best known for her work in variable stars, astrometry, spectroscopy, meteors, and the Bright Star Catalog. She is also known for her mentorship of many young women and generations of astronomers.
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Carl R. de Boor
#18508
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Carl-Wilhelm Reinhold de Boor is a German-American mathematician and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1993, de Boor was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to numerical analysis and methods in particular numerical tools used in computer-aided design.
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Thomas Reardon
#18509
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Thomas Reardon is an American computational neuroscientist and the CEO and co-founder of CTRL-labs. Formerly, he was a computer programmer and developer at Microsoft. He is credited with creating the project to build Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer , which was the world's most used browser during its peak in the early 2000s. He founded CTRL-labs in 2015 with neuroscientists from Columbia University. Following the acquisition of CTRL-labs he leads the neural interfaces group at Facebook Reality Labs.
Go to Profile#18499
Gordon Lightfoot
#18510
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist who achieved international success in folk, folk-rock, and country music. He is credited with helping to define the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and 1970s. He has been referred to as Canada's greatest songwriter and his songs have been recorded by some of the world's most renowned musical artists. Lightfoot's biographer Nicholas Jennings said, "His name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness."
Go to Profile#18500
Malcolm McDowell
#18511
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Malcolm McDowell is an English actor. He is known for portraying Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange and the title character in the "Mick Travis trilogy" . McDowell is the recipient of an Evening Standard British Film Award, alongside nominations for Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012.
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