Birthdays Today

July 21, 2026

Birthdays Today: July 21

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Sixty-two living people we could verify share today's birthday, from Cat Stevens and Manchester City striker Erling Haaland to Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau and a former president of Botswana, plus three giants of music, American cartooning, and Italian comedy all born on this exact July day in 1948.

The headliners

Cat Stevens turns 78 today, and few songbooks of the 1970s run deeper through the culture than his. As Cat Stevens he sold more than 100 million records and wrote "Wild World," "Father and Son)," "Peace Train," and "Morning Has Broken." Then, in 1977, he converted to Islam and took the name Yusuf Islam the following year, walking away from pop stardom at its peak and auctioning his guitars for charity. He returned to secular music in 2006, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, and played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in 2023. The turn came in 1975: swept out to sea while swimming off Malibu, convinced he was drowning, he vowed to devote his life to God if he survived. A wave carried him to shore. He kept the bargain.

Erling Haaland turns 26 today, and the most remarkable thing about his birthplace is that it is not Norway. He was born in Leeds, England, on this date in 2000 while his father, Alf-Inge Haaland, was playing for Leeds United, which made him eligible to play for England. He chose Norway, the country his parents are from, and has become a 1.95-metre goal machine for Manchester City, setting the Premier League single-season scoring record of 36 goals in his first year. His mother, Gry Marita Braut, was a Norwegian heptathlon champion, and at age five he reportedly set a world age-group record of 1.63 metres in the standing long jump. The genes, the geography, and the numbers all describe the same striker.

Josh Hartnett turns 48 today, and his career is one of Hollywood's great what-ifs. At the turn of the 2000s, fresh off Pearl Harbor) and Black Hawk Down), he turned down Superman twice and met Christopher Nolan about playing Batman, pitching himself instead for a smaller role in The Prestige) (both parts went to Christian Bale). Uncomfortable with "borderline unhealthy" attention and stalkers at his door, he left Los Angeles for his home state of Minnesota and spent his twenties in indie films. The industry mostly moved on, but Hartnett kept the instinct: he resurfaced as physicist Ernest Lawrence in Oppenheimer) (2023) and headlined M. Night Shyamalan's Trap) (2024).

Garry Trudeau turns 78 today, and Doonesbury was the first daily comic strip ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, which it did in 1975, when the award traditionally went to single-panel editorial cartoonists. He started the strip as "Bull Tales" in the Yale Daily News, syndicated it as Doonesbury in 1970, and ran it daily until 2014. President Gerald Ford joked there were "three major vehicles to keep us informed" in Washington: electronic media, print media, and Doonesbury. He has been married to NBC anchor Jane Pauley since 1980, and in 2013 created Alpha House, Amazon's first streaming original series, starring John Goodman. His great-grandfather Edward Livingston Trudeau founded the Adirondack tuberculosis sanatorium that bears the family name.

Jon Lovitz turns 69 today, and if you have ever said "yeah, that's the ticket!" to sell a weak lie, you are quoting his Tommy Flanagan, the Pathological Liar, born at the Groundlings and turned into one of Saturday Night Live's first breakout characters of the 1985-90 era. He was nominated for an Emmy his first two seasons on the show, alongside Phil Hartman, his close friend and Groundlings classmate. When Hartman was murdered in 1998, Lovitz joined the cast of NewsRadio to take his place, a job he said he accepted "for Phil." He voiced the caustic critic Jay Sherman on The Critic, played the scout in A League of Their Own, and became a reliable fixture of Adam Sandler's company. For years he ran his own comedy club at Universal CityWalk.

Mokgweetsi Masisi turns 65 today, and his is a rare modern political story with a clean ending. He served as the fifth president of Botswana from 2018 until November 2024, when his Botswana Democratic Party, in power since independence in 1966, was swept out by Duma Boko's coalition in its first landslide defeat in 58 years. Masisi conceded before the final results were even in, saying he respected the will of the people. Before politics he was a high school social studies teacher in Moshupa, a curriculum specialist at the University of Botswana, and a UNICEF education officer, with a master's from Florida State. He also once won acclaim playing the lead in a Gaborone stage production of Cry, the Beloved Country.

A note before the roll call: the 1948 birthdays above are not a coincidence. Cat Stevens, Garry Trudeau, and Italian comedian-turned-Five Star Movement co-founder Beppe Grillo were all born on this exact July 21 in 1948, all turning 78, in three entirely different fields. The date also clusters a 1978 trio (Josh Hartnett, Justin Bartha, and Damian Marley, all 48), a 1981 quartet of singer Romeo Santos, singer Paloma Faith, Selling Sunset's Chrishell Stause, and Real Betis legend Joaquin (all 45), and a 1989 trio of Juno Temple, Rory Culkin, and Hamilton's Jasmine Cephas Jones (all 37).

Also celebrating today

Music

Screen

Sports

Public life and politics

Writers, art, and media

Six headliners above, fifty-six more here, sixty-two candles in all. Happy birthday to them, and to anyone reading who shares the date.

That’s the reading for this issue.