Birthdays Today

July 31, 2026

Birthdays Today: July 31

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Fifty-four living people we could verify share today's birthday, from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, turning 61, action star Wesley Snipes, turning 64, and billionaire Mark Cuban, turning 68, to tennis legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley, turning 75, plus a remarkable 1944 trio of three notables across screen acting, Nobel economics, and Irish civil rights all turning 82 on this exact day, and a 1989 quartet across tennis and screen all turning 37.

The headliners

J.K. Rowling turns 61 today, and the woman who dreamed up Harry Potter on a delayed Manchester-to-London train in 1990 has sold more books than almost anyone alive: over 600 million copies across 84 languages, the best-selling book series in history. The seven years between that train idea and the first novel's 1997 publication were brutal. Her mother died, she moved to Portugal, married, had a daughter, divorced, and came back to Britain as a single parent living near the poverty line. Here is the detail that sticks: Bloomsbury asked her to publish under initials because they thought boys would not read a wizard book by a woman. She has no middle name, so she borrowed K from her paternal grandmother Kathleen. Forbes named her the world's highest-paid author in 2008, and she has since given more than $200 million to charity.

Wesley Snipes turns 64 today, and long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe existed he was its trailblazer. His 1998 Blade was the film that proved a Marvel character could headline a blockbuster, years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe existed, and he slipped back into the leather coat for Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024 to a theater full of cheers. Films he has appeared in have grossed over $3.6 billion worldwide. What surprises people is how real the martial arts are: Snipes has trained since he was twelve and holds a fifth-dan black belt in Shotokan karate and a second dan in Hapkido, and he is credited with bringing serious martial-arts choreography into mainstream Hollywood action. He broke out in New Jack City and White Men Can't Jump, and in 2017 he even published a novel, the urban fantasy Talon of God.

Mark Cuban turns 68 today, and the Pittsburgh kid who sold garbage bags door-to-door at twelve to buy a pair of expensive sneakers turned that instinct into a fortune Forbes pegged at about $6 billion this January. At sixteen he spotted a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike and ran newspapers in from Cleveland to keep neighbors supplied. He founded MicroSolutions and then Broadcast.com, selling the latter to Yahoo at the top of the bubble and walking away a billionaire. He bought the Dallas Mavericks and partied through their 2011 NBA title, then spent thirteen seasons as the sharpest-elbowed shark on ABC's Shark Tank before stepping away in 2025. He still owns a minority stake in the Mavs and has lately been tilting at the drug-pricing system with his Cost Plus Drugs company.

Fatboy Slim turns 63 today, and the man born Quentin Leo Cook in Bromley is the architect who turned big beat into party music the whole world recognized. Praise You, The Rockafeller Skank, and Weapon of Choice, the last of which won six MTV Video Music Awards in a single night, all came from the same Brighton studio. Before the decks he was the bassist in the Housemartins, who hit UK number one with Caravan of Love. The detail you will not believe: at Reigate Grammar School he took violin lessons sitting next to a boy named Keir Starmer, now the British prime minister. He dropped the name Quentin because classmates teased him over the actor Quentin Crisp and renamed himself Norman. He holds a Guinness record for the most UK number-one singles by one musician across different acts.

Evonne Goolagong Cawley turns 75 today, and the Wiradjuri woman from Barellan, New South Wales, was the player who made tennis look effortless. She won seven Grand Slam singles titles and 86 tour-level singles titles in all, reached world number one, and is still the only woman to have beaten Margaret Court, Martina Navratilova, and Chris Evert each in a major final. The feat that defines her: in 1980 she won Wimbledon as a mother, the first mother to take the title in 66 years. She had first won it in 1971 at nineteen, completing the Channel Slam in the same summer. Named Australian of the Year at twenty, she now runs the Goolagong National Development Camp, encouraging Indigenous children to stay in school through sport.

Geraldine Chaplin turns 82 today, and the filmography reads like a map of European cinema. She is the daughter of Charlie Chaplin, who was fifty-five when she was born, and the playwright Eugene O'Neill's granddaughter, which makes her Hollywood royalty several times over. David Lean cast her as Tonya in Doctor Zhivago in 1965, and she went on to star for Robert Altman in Nashville and for Carlos Saura across a dozen years and films. The uncanny detail: in the 1992 biopic Chaplin she played her own grandmother, Hannah Chaplin, and earned a Golden Globe nomination for it. A newer audience found her as the Duchess of Windsor in The Crown. She holds American, British, and Spanish citizenship and is still working, with a career now in its eighth decade.

A note before the roll call

Two birthdays-within-the-birthday are worth pausing on. Three notables born on this exact day in 1944 are all turning 82, across three completely unrelated fields: Geraldine Chaplin in screen acting, Robert C. Merton in economics (the Nobel laureate who, with Myron Scholes, gave the world the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model), and David Norris) in Irish public life (the senator whose fourteen-year campaign overturned the anti-homosexuality law that felled Oscar Wilde). And four notables born on this day in 1989 are all turning 37: tennis former world number one Victoria Azarenka, Robin Williams's filmmaker daughter Zelda Williams, Pitch Perfect's Alexis Knapp, and Blood & Treasure star Sofia Pernas.

Also celebrating today

Screen & film

Music

Sports

World & public life

Internet & media

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