Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1972?

831 of the people we track were surely alive in 1972. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Born in 1972: Eminem, Zinedine Zidane, Gwyneth Paltrow, Josh Duhamel, Dwayne Johnson, Ben Affleck, Andrzej Duda and Cameron Diaz.

Died in 1972: Harry S. Truman, Kwame Nkrumah, Yasunari Kawabata, Ezra Pound, Edward VIII and Maria Göppert Mayer.

  1. Barack Obama11
  2. Donald Trump26
  3. Michael Jackson14
  4. Vladimir Putin20
  5. Ronald Reagan61
  6. Nelson Mandela54
  7. George W. Bush26
  8. Joe Biden30
  9. Pablo Picasso91
  10. Charlie Chaplin83
  11. Elizabeth II46
  12. Salvador Dalí68
  13. Bill Gates17
  14. Jimmy Wales6
  15. Pope Francis36
  16. Mao Zedong79
  17. Steve Jobs17
  18. Bill Clinton26
  19. Angela Merkel18
  20. Neil Armstrong42
  21. François Hollande18
  22. Elvis Presley37
  23. Margaret Thatcher47
  24. John Paul II52
  25. Gabriel García Márquez45
  26. Fidel Castro46
  27. J. R. R. Tolkien80
  28. Marlene Dietrich71
  29. Mikhail Gorbachev41
  30. Jean-Paul Sartre67
  31. Stephen Hawking30
  32. Elon Musk1
  33. Mother Teresa62
  34. Jimmy Carter48
  35. Benedict XVI45
  36. Harry S. Truman88 †
  37. Agatha Christie82
  38. Hillary Clinton25
  39. George H. W. Bush48
  40. Jorge Luis Borges73
  41. Nicolas Sarkozy17
  42. Madonna14
  43. Kamala Harris8
  44. Richard Nixon59
  45. Xi Jinping19
  46. Naruhito12
  47. Alfred Hitchcock73
  48. Noam Chomsky44
  49. Simone de Beauvoir64
  50. Hugo Chávez18
  51. Muammar Gaddafi30
  52. Sung Jae-gi5
  53. John Lennon32
  54. Bob Dylan31
  55. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan18
  56. Pelé32
  57. Muhammad Ali30
  58. J. K. Rowling7
  59. Andy Warhol44
  60. Kofi Annan34
  61. Osama bin Laden15
  62. Akira Kurosawa62
  63. Lech Wałęsa29
  64. Freddie Mercury26
  65. Charles III24
  66. Lyndon B. Johnson64
  67. Gerald Ford59
  68. Diego Maradona12
  69. Eminemborn
  70. Leo XIV17
  71. Indira Gandhi55
  72. Narendra Modi22
  73. Rafael Correa9
  74. Huang Xianfan73
  75. Naguib Mahfouz61
  76. Aung San Suu Kyi27
  77. Steven Spielberg26
  78. Michael Schumacher3
  79. Saddam Hussein35
  80. Benjamin Netanyahu23
  81. Tenzin Gyatso37
  82. Dmitry Medvedev7
  83. Anna Netrebko1
  84. Pablo Neruda68
  85. Rafael Orozco Maestre18
  86. Bruce Lee32
  87. Silvio Berlusconi36
  88. Bob Marley27
  89. Shinzō Abe18
  90. Isaac Asimov52–53
  91. Tim Berners-Lee17
  92. Ingmar Bergman54
  93. Federico Fellini52
  94. Mahathir Mohamad47
  95. Boris Yeltsin41
  96. Ali Khamenei33
  97. Robin Williams21
  98. Jackie Chan18
  99. Kim Il-sung60
  100. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn54
  101. Jacques Chirac40
  102. Guillermo Lasso17
  103. Céline Dion4
  104. Stanley Kubrick44
  105. Kwame Nkrumah62 †
  106. Marlon Brando48
  107. Alexander Lukashenka18
  108. Hirohito71
  109. Richard Feynman54
  110. Woody Allen37
  111. Tony Blair19
  112. Yasser Arafat43
  113. Ban Ki-moon28
  114. Arnold Schwarzenegger25
  115. David Cameron6
  116. Linus Torvalds3
  117. Brigitte Bardot38
  118. Vladimir Nabokov73
  119. Hebe Camargo43
  120. Umberto Eco40

The 120 best known of 831 are listed.