Birthdays Today

July 23, 2026

Birthdays Today: July 23

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Fifty-one living people we could verify share today's birthday, from Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe, turning 37 with a fresh Tony on his shelf, and former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, turning 90, to an extraordinary 1973 cohort of five notables across five fields all turning 53 together, plus a 1941 pairing of Italy's sitting president and a Nobel-winning physicist both turning 85.

The headliners

Daniel Radcliffe turns 37 today, and few actors carry a role as globally recognizable as the one he grew up inside. He played Harry Potter in all eight films from 2001 to 2011, cast at eleven and among the world's highest-paid actors before he could legally drink. What is striking is how deliberately he has run from that since. He did Equus on stage at seventeen, played a farting corpse in Swiss Army Man, and played "Weird Al" Yankovic in a biopic. In June 2024 he won his first Tony Award, for Best Featured Actor in a Musical as Charley Kringas in Merrily We Roll Along, his first major acting award. Born in Hammersmith, London to a South African Jewish casting-agent mother and a Northern Irish literary-agent father, he also published poetry under the pen name Jacob Gershon. He and partner Erin Darke have one son.

Woody Harrelson turns 65 today, and the surprising chapter of his life is the one before he was famous. Born in Midland, Texas and raised in Lebanon, Ohio by his legal-secretary mother, he had little contact with his father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, a convicted contract killer who received life for the 1979 assassination of federal judge John H. Wood Jr. and died in the ADX Florence supermax prison in 2007. The cheer he found was literal: he broke out as the amiable bartender Woody Boyd on Cheers, winning a 1989 Emmy. Three Oscar nominations followed, for The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Messenger, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, plus Haymitch Abernathy across The Hunger Games and the brooding detective of True Detective season one. A longtime vegan and environmentalist, he was briefly married to Neil Simon's daughter in the 1980s before marrying Laura Louie in 2008.

Slash) turns 61 today, and his guitar intro to "Sweet Child o' Mine" is one you can hum from two notes. Born Saul Hudson in Hampstead, London and raised in Stoke-on-Trent until age six before his family moved to Los Angeles, he joined Guns N' Roses in 1985 and the riffs he wrote, from "Welcome to the Jungle" to "Paradise City," became hard-rock architecture. A family friend gave him the nickname "Slash" because, as a child, he was constantly in motion. The name came from cartoonist Saul Steinberg. His mother Ola Hudson was an African-American fashion designer and costumier and his father Anthony Hudson an English artist, a mixed background he has said amused him as a musician. After heart failure in 2001 he reformed his life, and Guns N' Roses, with him back on lead guitar, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012. He is British and American.

Anthony Kennedy turns 90 today, a milestone for the oldest living former Supreme Court justice. Born in Sacramento, educated at Stanford and Harvard Law, he was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and confirmed by the Senate 97 to 0, still the most recent unanimous Supreme Court confirmation. For much of the Roberts Court he was the decisive swing vote. He retired on July 31, 2018 and was succeeded by his own former law clerk, Brett Kavanaugh. The surprising part is how present he remains: nearly eight years after stepping down he still keeps chambers inside the Supreme Court building and regularly joins his former colleagues for lunch, and in early 2026 he published a memoir, Life, Law & Liberty, sitting for a rare ABC News interview to reflect on his legacy.

Monica Lewinsky turns 53 today, and few public figures have reframed a national humiliation into a second act as completely. A White House intern in 1995 and 1996, her affair with President Bill Clinton became the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and led to his impeachment. She earned a master's in social psychology from the London School of Economics in 2006, and a 2014 Vanity Fair essay, "Shame and Survival," reopened her public life on her own terms. She has called herself "patient zero of online harassment," turning that into anti-bullying advocacy through a TED talk and the organization Bystander Revolution. The most unexpected move came in 2020, when she co-produced American Crime Story: Impeachment, the television dramatization of her own scandal, helping tell the story from the women's perspective. Born in San Francisco, she has become a writer and producer on the subject of public shaming.

Gary Payton turns 58 today, and his nickname, "the Glove," tells you what made him a Hall of Famer. A point guard out of Oakland who played 17 NBA seasons, mostly for the Seattle SuperSonics, he was a lockdown, trash-talking defender. In 1996 he became the first point guard ever to win NBA Defensive Player of the Year, and until Marcus Smart in 2022 he was the only point guard to hold it, a 26-year monopoly at the position. He made nine All-Star teams, tied the record with nine All-Defensive First Team selections, and finally won his championship ring with the 2006 Miami Heat alongside Shaquille O'Neal and Dwyane Wade. He added two Olympic golds in 1996 and 2000, entered the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2013, and was named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team. The nickname came from a cousin who said he covered Kevin Johnson "like a baseball glove."

A note before the roll call

Before the long list, the day's strangest coincidence: five notable people were all born on this exact day in 1973, every one turning 53, across five different fields. Headliner Monica Lewinsky (activism) shares the date with Kathryn Hahn (screen), Nomar Garciaparra (baseball), Himesh Reshammiya (Bollywood music), and Darvin Ham (NBA coaching). Four years earlier, July 23, 1941 produced its own pair of heavyweights both turning 85: Sergio Mattarella, the sitting president of Italy and its longest-serving one, and Pierre Agostini, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for the attosecond light pulses that let scientists watch electrons move inside atoms. A president and a Nobel laureate, born the same day.

Also celebrating today

Screen & stage

Music

Sports

World & public life

Science, style & the internet

That’s the reading for this issue.