Birthdays Today

July 12, 2026

Birthdays Today: July 12

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Fifty-four living people we could verify share today's birthday, from the youngest Nobel laureate in history to the Front Man of Squid Game.

The headliners

Malala Yousafzai turns 29 today. She is the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate ever, handed the medal at 17 in 2014 for insisting, after a Taliban gunman shot her on a school bus in Pakistan, that girls have a right to learn. These days she runs the Malala Fund and has quietly added film and television producer to her resume. The detail most people miss: she was named not after a contemporary but after Malalai of Maiwand, a folk heroine who, as the story goes, rallied Afghan soldiers by waving her veil as a flag at a pivotal 1880 battle. Malala was 11 when she began writing a BBC blog about life under Taliban rule, using the pen name Gul Makai. She survived a bullet to the head, finished her degree at Oxford, and built a global education movement before most people her age have settled on a career.

Michelle Rodriguez turns 48 today. She is the engine of the Fast and Furious franchise, playing Letty Ortiz across more than two decades of films, and she broke in opposite that as the boxer in Girlfight. The surprising part is how she got started. She answered an open casting call on a whim, beat out 350 other applicants at her first-ever audition, and won an Independent Spirit Award for a debut performance she nearly did not chase. Rodriguez grew up moving between the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and New Jersey, was raised in her mother's Jehovah's Witness faith, and was expelled from five schools before earning her GED. She has also anchored the Resident Evil films, appeared in Avatar, and voiced a Marine in Halo 2, building a career almost entirely inside the action lane she stumbled into.

Kristi Yamaguchi turns 55 today. She won Olympic gold in ladies' figure skating at the 1992 Albertville Games, becoming the first Asian American to win gold at a Winter Olympics, and later traded the ice for a mirror-ball trophy on season six of Dancing with the Stars. The part that stops people: Yamaguchi was born with bilateral clubfoot, spent much of her first year in serial leg casts and corrective shoes, and first took the ice as physical therapy. That therapy turned into a pairs career alongside Rudy Galindo, a world junior title, and then singles dominance, including back-to-back world championships. After retiring from competition in 1992 she won the World Professional championships four times and became a children's book author, landing on the New York Times bestseller list with Dream Big, Little Pig.

Lee Byung-hun turns 56 today. He is the masked Front Man of Squid Game, and to global audiences he is also Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe films, the T-1000 in Terminator Genisys, and a gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven. The detail worth pausing on: he was the first South Korean actor to present at the Academy Awards, and he and Ahn Sung-ki became the first South Koreans to press their handprints into the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. At home he has been named Gallup Korea's film actor and television actor of the year in separate years, and the government awarded him the Bo-gwan Order of Cultural Merit in 2025. He studied French literature at Hanyang University before acting, and his younger sister once won Miss Korea.

Kimberly Perry turns 43 today. She is the voice and chief songwriter of The Band Perry, the country trio whose breakout "If I Die Young" went six-times platinum and won her the Country Music Association's Song of the Year as its sole writer, only the fourth woman to take that prize with a solo composition. The family angle is the surprise: her younger brothers, Neil and Reid, did not start as bandmates. They were her roadies and her opening act first, carrying gear for Kimberly's solo teenage gigs before the three joined forces and got signed. The band piled up a Grammy, CMA and ACM awards, and three number-one country singles before pivoting toward pop and, in 2023, announcing a hiatus. Kimberly has since gone solo, releasing her own music while the brothers regroup.

Rachel Brosnahan turns 36 today. She is Midge Maisel, the fizzy 1950s housewife-turned-comedian of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a role that won her a Primetime Emmy and two straight Golden Globes, and she is now Lois Lane in the new DC Universe, debuting in 2025's Superman. The genuinely surprising connection: her aunt was Kate Spade, the fashion designer behind the handbag empire, and Brosnahan spoke about that legacy publicly after Spade's death. Before the spotlight she was a high-school wrestler and a snowboarding instructor in suburban Chicago, and she caught her break playing Rachel Posner on House of Cards, a part originally written for two episodes that the showrunner expanded the moment he saw her. She graduated from NYU's Tisch School while her career was already accelerating.

Also celebrating today

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