Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1956?

739 of the people we track were surely alive in 1956. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Born in 1956: Theresa May, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Tsai Ing-wen, Carrie Fisher and Martina Navratilova.

Died in 1956: Bertolt Brecht, B. R. Ambedkar, Jackson Pollock and Irène Joliot-Curie.

  1. Donald Trump10
  2. Vladimir Putin4
  3. Ronald Reagan45
  4. Nelson Mandela38
  5. George W. Bush10
  6. Joe Biden14
  7. Pablo Picasso75
  8. Winston Churchill82
  9. Charlie Chaplin67
  10. Elizabeth II30
  11. John F. Kennedy39
  12. Martin Luther King Jr.27
  13. Salvador Dalí52
  14. Bill Gates1
  15. Marilyn Monroe30
  16. Pope Francis20
  17. Mao Zedong63
  18. Steve Jobs1
  19. Che Guevara28
  20. Bill Clinton10
  21. Charles de Gaulle66
  22. Angela Merkel2
  23. Neil Armstrong26
  24. François Hollande2
  25. Walt Disney55
  26. Elvis Presley21
  27. Ernest Hemingway57
  28. Margaret Thatcher31
  29. John Paul II36
  30. Gabriel García Márquez29
  31. Fidel Castro30
  32. J. R. R. Tolkien64
  33. Albert Camus43
  34. Yuri Gagarin22
  35. Marlene Dietrich55
  36. Mikhail Gorbachev25
  37. Jean-Paul Sartre51
  38. Stephen Hawking14
  39. Le Corbusier69
  40. Mother Teresa46
  41. Jimmy Carter32
  42. Benedict XVI29
  43. Harry S. Truman72
  44. Agatha Christie66
  45. Hillary Clinton9
  46. George H. W. Bush32
  47. Jorge Luis Borges57
  48. Nicolas Sarkozy1
  49. Jawaharlal Nehru67
  50. Dwight D. Eisenhower66
  51. Richard Nixon43
  52. Xi Jinping3
  53. Alfred Hitchcock57
  54. Noam Chomsky28
  55. Simone de Beauvoir48
  56. Hugo Chávez2
  57. Niels Bohr71
  58. Bertrand Russell84
  59. Muammar Gaddafi14
  60. John Lennon16
  61. Bob Dylan15
  62. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan2
  63. Pelé16
  64. Muhammad Ali14
  65. Frank Lloyd Wright89
  66. Andy Warhol28
  67. Louis Armstrong55
  68. Kofi Annan18
  69. Akira Kurosawa46
  70. Lech Wałęsa13
  71. Freddie Mercury10
  72. Charles III8
  73. Lyndon B. Johnson48
  74. Gerald Ford43
  75. Leo XIV1
  76. Indira Gandhi39
  77. Narendra Modi6
  78. Huang Xianfan57
  79. Naguib Mahfouz45
  80. Aung San Suu Kyi11
  81. Steven Spielberg10
  82. Nikita Khrushchev62
  83. Saddam Hussein19
  84. Benjamin Netanyahu7
  85. Helen Keller76
  86. Tenzin Gyatso21
  87. Pablo Neruda52
  88. Rafael Orozco Maestre2
  89. Igor Stravinsky74
  90. Bruce Lee16
  91. Erwin Schrödinger69
  92. Silvio Berlusconi20
  93. Bob Marley11
  94. Shinzō Abe2
  95. Herbert Hoover82
  96. Hermann Hesse79
  97. Isaac Asimov36–37
  98. Tim Berners-Lee1
  99. Ingmar Bergman38
  100. Federico Fellini36
  101. Mahathir Mohamad31
  102. Boris Yeltsin25
  103. Ali Khamenei17
  104. Robin Williams5
  105. Jackie Chan2
  106. Kim Il-sung44
  107. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn38
  108. Jacques Chirac24
  109. Guillermo Lasso1
  110. T. S. Eliot68
  111. Stanley Kubrick28
  112. Kwame Nkrumah47
  113. Marlon Brando32
  114. Alexander Lukashenka2
  115. Hirohito55
  116. Richard Feynman38
  117. Woody Allen21
  118. Tony Blair3
  119. Bertolt Brecht58 †
  120. Yasser Arafat27

The 120 best known of 739 are listed.