Birthdays Today

July 15, 2026

Birthdays Today: July 15

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Sixty-two living people we could verify share today's birthday, from an Oscar-winning actor and the Queen of Rock turning 80 to a 93-year-old who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, plus five notable people all born on the exact same July day in 1952.

The headliners

Forest Whitaker turns 65 today, and he owns one of the most distinctive faces in movies. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his terrifying, charm-then-menace performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland) (2006), making him only the fourth Black man to win that category. He has been a fixture for four decades, from Platoon and Good Morning, Vietnam to Rogue One and Black Panther. The surprise: before any of that, he went to college on a football scholarship, then transferred to USC on a music scholarship to train as an operatic tenor. Acting was the third scholarship. He also has ptosis, a hereditary drooping of the left eyelid, which he never had corrected because it became part of his look.

Linda Ronstadt turns 80 today, and Phoenix musicians are throwing her an all-star tribute concert to mark it. She sold more than 100 million records and was arguably the biggest female rock star of the 1970s, leaping between rock, country, pop, Mexican folk, and standards with a voice the Kennedy Center called "the defining voice of a generation." Here is the detail that amazes people: the Eagles exist because of her. In 1971 she hired Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Randy Meisner, and Bernie Leadon) as her backing band, and they formed the Eagles while on tour with her. She can no longer sing, having retired in 2011 after a Parkinson's-like condition called progressive supranuclear palsy gradually stole her voice.

Damian Lillard turns 36 today. The nine-time NBA All-Star and "Dame Time" buzzer-beater icon spent his first eleven seasons in Portland, was shockingly traded to Milwaukee in 2023, then returned to the Trail Blazers on a three-year deal in July 2025 after the Bucks waived him. He may miss the 2025-26 season recovering from a torn Achilles tendon, but the homecoming cemented his legacy as Portland's most loyal star. The surprise: Lillard is a legitimate rapper. Under the name Dame D.O.L.L.A., he has released multiple studio albums featuring real hip-hop heavyweights like Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz, and Jamie Foxx, not novelty records but actual charting rap albums.

Diane Kruger turns 50 today. The German actress broke through as Helen in Troy) and the historian in National Treasure, then delivered her most indelible performance as the German film star and double agent Bridget von Hammersmark in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. She won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for In the Fade (2017). The surprising part is what came before movies. From age eleven she trained at the Royal Ballet School in London, aiming to be a ballerina, until a knee injury at thirteen ended that dream. She has also said that as a child in Germany she earned money as a "professional mourner," standing by coffins holding a candle at funeral services.

Arianna Huffington turns 76 today. She founded The Huffington Post in 2005, built it into one of the most-trafficked news sites in America, and sold it to AOL for $315 million in 2011. She now runs Thrive Global, a company focused on health and productivity. The surprise is the arc. She started as a conservative Republican, married a Republican Senate candidate, and wrote Newt Gingrich-friendly columns. By the late 1990s she had pivoted hard to the left. Before any of it, at twenty-one, she became president of the Cambridge Union, the first foreign-born person to lead the storied debating society. Her father had survived a Nazi concentration camp after being arrested for running an underground newspaper in occupied Greece.

Jesse Ventura turns 75 today. He is the only person ever to go from pro wrestler to state governor, serving as Minnesota's 38th governor from 1999 to 2003 after winning as a third-party Reform Party candidate in one of the great upsets in American politics. He spent about $300,000 on the race and beat both the Democratic and Republican nominees, declaring "We shocked the world!" The surprise: before the sequined robes and the gubernatorial mansion, he served in the Navy as a member of Underwater Demolition Team 12, a precursor to the SEALs, during the Vietnam War. He also appeared in Predator) alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, and later hosted a conspiracy-theory television show, proving his second career is as unpredictable as his first.

A note before the roll call: five notable people share the exact same birthday, July 15, 1952, all turning 74 today. Terry O'Quinn (Lost's John Locke), Marky Ramone (the Ramones' drummer), Celia Imrie (Bridget Jones's Diary), David Pack (Ambrosia frontman), and John Cleland (two-time British Touring Car champion). That is quite a five-way split of a single day.

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