Birthdays Today

July 28, 2026

Birthdays Today: July 28

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Sixty-four living people we could verify share today's birthday, from England captain Harry Kane, turning 33, and Garfield creator Jim Davis, turning 81, to Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham and former Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, both turning 52, UFC chief Dana White, turning 57, and architect Santiago Calatrava, turning 75, plus a 1984 quartet of four notables across four completely different fields all turning 42 on this exact day.

The headliners

Harry Kane turns 33 today, and few footballers on the planet carry a goalscoring résumé like his. Born 28 July 1993 in Walthamstow and raised in Chingford, he captains England and now plays for Bayern Munich, with more than 500 career goals for club and country. He is Tottenham Hotspur's all-time top scorer (280), England's all-time top scorer (85), and the Premier League's second-highest scorer ever (213). He joined Bayern in 2023 for a Bundesliga-record fee and just won his first major trophies in 2025-26, the league and cup double, scoring a hat trick in the cup final. The genuinely surprising part: as a boy he was released by Arsenal's academy, who decided he did not have what it would take to become a professional, and he spent years back in grassroots football, even on trial elsewhere, before Tottenham finally signed him at eleven.

Jim Davis) turns 81 today, and the lazy, lasagna-loving cat he drew has been one of the most recognized characters on Earth for nearly half a century. Born 28 July 1945 in Marion, Indiana, he grew up on a small Black Angus cattle farm and created Garfield in 1978; it became one of the world's most widely syndicated comic strips, appearing in dozens of languages. He studied art and business at Ball State University alongside a fellow student named David Letterman. The charming detail: Davis modeled Garfield's owner, Jon Arbuckle, on himself, so Jon is also a cartoonist, was also raised on a farm, and also has a birthday of 28 July. And, ironically for the man who built an empire on a cat, his first wife was allergic to them.

Hannah Waddingham turns 52 today, and she became a global star playing AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton in Ted Lasso, winning a Primetime Emmy for it. Before that she was the shaming, bell-ringing Septa Unella in Game of Thrones, and she co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023. Born 28 July 1974 in Wandsworth, London, she is a West End musical veteran with three Olivier Award nominations for Spamalot, A Little Night Music, and Kiss Me, Kate, and recently appeared in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and The Garfield Movie. The surprising lineage: she is half Manx, and her mother and both maternal grandparents were opera singers with the English National Opera, so performance is quite literally the family trade.

Dana White turns 57 today, and he is the man who turned mixed martial arts from a fringe spectacle into a global business as president and CEO of the UFC. Born 28 July 1969 in Manchester, Connecticut, he was a manager for fighters when he tipped off his friends Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta that the UFC could be bought; the Fertittas purchased it for $2 million in 2001 and installed White as president. Under him it was sold for $4 billion in 2016, and he was named CEO in 2023 as part of TKO Group Holdings. Forbes put his net worth above $600 million in 2025, the same year Meta elected him to its board. He also founded the slap-fighting promotion Power Slap and co-founded Zuffa Boxing.

Santiago Calatrava turns 75 today, and his sculptural bridges, stations, and museums bend toward the organic as if they were alive. Born 28 July 1951 in Valencia, the Spanish-Swiss architect and structural engineer designed the Turning Torso tower in Malmö, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Athens Olympic Sports Complex, the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York, and the City of Arts and Sciences in his hometown. The surprising texture: his Calatrava name comes from an old aristocratic line once tied to a Spanish knightly order, and he trained as both artist and engineer. He arrived at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1968 only to land in the middle of the student uprisings, went home, and found a book on Le Corbusier that convinced him he could be both at once.

Alexis Tsipras turns 52 today, and he led Greece through the most turbulent chapter of its debt crisis as prime minister from 2015 to 2019. Born 28 July 1974 in Athens, he led the left-wing Syriza party and governed through the 2015 bailout referendum and a third EU bailout that, despite his earlier anti-austerity stand, defined his term. The surprising part is how he arrived there: he is a civil engineer by training, graduating from the National Technical University of Athens in 2000 and working in construction before politics, after joining the Communist Youth and serving as a student-protest spokesperson in the 1990s. And he became famous for never wearing a tie, pledging to put one on only when Greece exited the bailout, a vow he kept in August 2018.

A note before the roll call

A few of today's birthdays arrive in clusters worth pausing on. The standout is a 1984 quartet all turning 42 across four different fields: NHL winger Zach Parise, NFL head coach DeMeco Ryans, two-time World Cup-winning US soccer defender Ali Krieger, and actor John David Washington. Two headliners, Hannah Waddingham and Alexis Tsipras, share their exact birthday with rapper Afroman, a 1974 trio all turning 52 across screen, politics, and music. And England's Harry Kane shares his date and birth year with pop singer Cher Lloyd, a 1993 pair both turning 33. Calatrava's 1951 also produced a trio with NBA Hall of Famer Doug Collins) and rock keyboardist Gregg Giuffria, all 75.

Also celebrating today

Screen and stage

Music

Sports

World and public life

Science, arts, writers, and media

The youngest on today's list is rapper GloRilla at 27, and the oldest is former Thai prime minister Chuan Leekpai at 88. If you share July 28, you are in very crowded, very good company.

That’s the reading for this issue.