A sculptor, painter and architect who called himself a sculptor above all: the Pieta was made at twenty-four, the David at twenty-nine. He painted the Sistine ceiling over four years almost single-handed, and the Last Judgment on its altar wall twenty-five years later; his final years went to the...
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Wife of Prince Charles from 1981, separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996; her marriage and its collapse were picked over in public as no one's had been before. She worked in charity — landmines, leprosy, and people with AIDS, whose hands she took ungloved when others were afraid to. She died in a...
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Queen of the United Kingdom from 1952 until her death in 2022 — seventy years on the throne, longer than any British monarch before her. Under her the empire dissolved and the Commonwealth took shape, and fifteen prime ministers came and went, from Churchill to Truss. Born in London on 21 April...
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The only US president elected four times: he took the country at the height of the Great Depression, carried it through the New Deal and then through a world war. At thirty-nine he contracted polio and was paralysed below the waist, a fact carefully kept from voters. He died in April 1945, a month...
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An actress who in six Hollywood years played for Hitchcock in Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and Dial M for Murder, and took an Oscar for The Country Girl. In 1956 she married Prince Rainier III and left films at twenty-six. She died in a car crash on the road above Monaco on 14 September 1982. Born
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An actor who managed lead roles in only three pictures — East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant — and became the image of a post-war youth with nowhere to put itself. He died in a car crash in California on 30 September 1955, aged twenty-four, a month before the second film opened. He is the
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The actor who brought Stella Adler's method to film and changed the very way of speaking on screen: A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront divided American acting into before and after. After a decade of failures he returned with The Godfather, refusing the Oscar in protest at the way...
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The singer and guitarist of Nirvana, whose album Nevermind in 1991 pushed everything else off the charts and carried the American underground to the top. He bore fame badly, suffering from chronic stomach pain and heroin addiction. He shot himself in Seattle in April 1994, aged twenty-seven. Born...
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The singer and lyricist of the Doors, who brought symbolist poetry and theatre into rock; four years and six records separate the first success from the end. The son of an admiral, trained in film at UCLA, he turned the concert into a rite and more than once into a court case. He died in Paris on 3
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A singer from a Texas oil town whose voice — hoarse, torn, coming straight out of the blues tradition — changed what a woman could sound like in rock. The breakthrough came at the Monterey festival in 1967, followed by Cheap Thrills and Pearl. She died of a heroin overdose in Hollywood on 4 October
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