Famous Birthdays on August 30

Fredrick Allen Hampton Sr. was an African American revolutionary and political activist who served as deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, a Marxist–Leninist and black power organization from 1966 until his assassination in 1969. He was also chair of the Illinois chapter and founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that combined Black Panthers, Young Patriots, and the Young Lords, which were all leftist political organizations that included African Americans, White Southerners, and Puerto Ricans. Hampton also formed an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. Hampton began his activism in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving as the Youth Council President of the West Suburban branch in the Chicago area.

Elizabeth Ann Cole, known professionally as Elizabeth Ashley, is an American actress of theatre, film, and television. She has been nominated for three Tony Awards, winning once in 1962 for Take Her, She's Mine. Ashley was also nominated for the BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for her supporting performance in The Carpetbaggers (1964), and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1991 for Evening Shade. Ashley was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 24 times. She appeared in several episodes of In the Heat of the Night as Maybelle Chesboro. She also appeared in an episode of Mannix, "The Dark Hours", in 1974. She is a 2024 inductee into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Timothy James Bottoms is an American actor and film producer. He is best known for playing the lead in Johnny Got His Gun (1971); Sonny Crawford in The Last Picture Show (1971), where he and his fellow co-stars, Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges, rose to fame; and as James Hart, the first-year law student who battles with Prof. Kingsfield, in the film adaptation The Paper Chase (1973). He is also known for playing the main antagonist in the disaster film Rollercoaster (1977) and for playing President George W. Bush multiple times, including on the sitcom That's My Bush!, the comedy film The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course and the docudrama DC 9/11: Time of Crisis.

Raymond Hart Massey was a Canadian and American actor. Known for his commanding stage-trained voice, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the title role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), a role he later reprised on television and in the film How the West Was Won (1962). Among his other well-known roles were Dr. Gillespie on the NBC television series Dr. Kildare (1961–66), John Brown in Santa Fe Trail (1940) and Seven Angry Men (1955), Abraham Farlan in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), and Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).

Ravi Shankar Prasad is an Indian politician and lawyer who served as 1st Minister of Electronics and Information Technology from 2016 to 2019 and 2019 to 2021. He is the member of Bharatiya Janata Party and Member of Parliament since 2000, first in the Rajya Sabha (2000–2019) and then in the Lok Sabha, Prasad has served as Union Minister multiple times: As Minister of State, he served in the ministries of Coal (2001–2003), Law and Justice (2002–2003), and Information and Broadcasting (2003–2004) under Atal Bihari Vajpayee's premiership; as Cabinet Minister, he held the Law and Justice, Communications portfolios under Narendra Modi's premiership.

Ellen Muriel Deason, known professionally as Kitty Wells, was an American pioneering country music singer. Her 1952 hit recording "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" made her the first female country singer to top the U.S. country charts. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” also was her first of several pop crossover hits. Wells is the only artist to be awarded top female vocalist awards for 14 consecutive years. Her chart-topping hits continued until the mid-1960s, paving the way for and inspiring a long list of female country singers who came to prominence in the 1960s.

Muriel Janet Gray is a Scottish author, broadcaster and journalist. She came to public notice as an interviewer on Channel 4's alternative pop-show The Tube, and then appeared as a regular presenter on BBC radio. Gray has written for Time Out, the Sunday Herald and The Guardian, among other publications, as well as publishing successful horror novels. She was the first woman to be Rector of the University of Edinburgh and is the first female chair of the board of governors at Glasgow School of Art. She is as a non-executive director of the BBC.

Evelyn De Morgan was an English painter associated early in her career with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and working in a range of styles including Aestheticism and Symbolism. Her paintings are figural, foregrounding the female body through the use of spiritual, mythological, and allegorical themes. They rely on a range of metaphors to express what several scholars have identified as spiritualist and feminist content. Her later works also dealt with the themes of war from a pacifist perspective, engaging with conflicts such as the Second Boer War and World War I.

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff Jr. was a Dutch physical chemist. A highly influential theoretical chemist, in 1901 Van 't Hoff won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for his] discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions". His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, chemical kinetics, and chemical thermodynamics. In his 1874 pamphlet, Van 't Hoff formulated the theory of the tetrahedral carbon atom and laid the foundations of stereochemistry. In 1875, he predicted the correct structures of allenes and cumulenes as well as their axial chirality. He is also widely considered one of the three co-founders of physical chemistry as the discipline is known today. The Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie was founded in 1887 by Van ’t Hoff, Svante Arrhenius and Wilhelm Ostwald, at Leipzig University as the first dedicated scientific journal for the discipline.

Ronald Alan George is an American politician who was a Republican member of the Maryland House of Delegates from 2007 to 2015. He first represented the 30th district in from 2007 to 2010, after which he was redrawn into the 33rd district. He sought the Republican nomination for Governor of Maryland in 2014, but finished fourth in the primary. In December 2014, George expressed interest in being appointed to the District 33 House of Delegates seat vacated by Cathy Vitale, who was appointed a judge. George unsuccessfully ran for the state Senate in District 30 in 2018; this district includes Annapolis.

Joseph Dennie was an American author and journalist who was one of the foremost men of letters of the Federalist Era. A Federalist, Dennie is best remembered for his series of essays entitled The Lay Preacher and as the founding editor of The Port Folio, a journal espousing classical republican values. Port Folio was the most highly regarded and successful literary publication of its time, and the first important political and literary journal in the United States. Timothy Dwight IV once referred to Dennie as "the Addison of America" and "the father of American Belles-Lettres."

Theodor Svedberg was a Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate for his research on colloids and proteins using the ultracentrifuge. Svedberg was active at Uppsala University from the mid-1900s to late 1940s. While at Uppsala, Svedberg started as a docent before becoming the university's physical chemistry head in 1912. After leaving Uppsala in 1949, Svedberg was in charge of the Gustaf Werner Institute until 1967. Apart from his 1926 Nobel Prize, Svedberg was named a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1944 and became part of the National Academy of Sciences in 1945.

Frederick Martin MacMurray was an American actor. He appeared in more than one hundred films and a successful television series in a career that spanned nearly a half-century. His career as a major film leading man began in 1935, but his most renowned role was in Billy Wilder's 1944 film noir Double Indemnity. From 1959 to 1973, MacMurray appeared in numerous Disney films, including The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, Follow Me, Boys!, and The Happiest Millionaire. He starred as Steve Douglas in the television series My Three Sons.

Wolfgang Wagner was a German opera director. He is best known as the director (Festspielleiter) of the Bayreuth Festival, a position he initially assumed alongside his brother Wieland in 1951 until the latter's death in 1966. From then on, he assumed total control until he retired in 2008, although many of the productions which he commissioned were severely criticized in their day. He had been plagued by family conflicts and criticism for many years. He was the son of Siegfried Wagner and he was the great-grandson of Franz Liszt.

Bhagwati Charan Verma was a Hindi author. He wrote many novels, his best work was Chitralekha (1934), which was made into two successful Hindi films in 1941 and 1964 respectively. He was awarded Sahitya Akademi Award for his epic five-part novel, Bhoole Bisre Chitra in 1961 and Padma Bhushan in 1971. He was also nominated to Rajya Sabha in 1978.Bhagwati Charan Verma was born in November 1903 in Lahore. His father Shiv Charan Verma was a high-ranking railway official. Bhagwati Charan Verma was taught by Adarsh Sachdeva.

John Leonard Swigert Jr. was an American NASA astronaut, test pilot, mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, United States Air Force pilot, and politician. In April 1970, as command module pilot of Apollo 13, he became one of 24 Apollo astronauts who reached the Moon. Due to the "slingshot" route around the Moon they chose to safely return to Earth, the Apollo 13 astronauts flew farther away from Earth than any other astronauts until the Artemis II lunar flyby in 2026, though they had to abort the Moon landing.

John Edmund Andrew Phillips was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He was the leader of the vocal group the Mamas & the Papas and remains frequently referred to as Papa John Phillips. In addition to writing the majority of the group's songs, he wrote "San Francisco " in 1967 for former Journeymen bandmate Scott McKenzie, and the oft-covered "Me and My Uncle", which was a favorite in the repertoire of the Grateful Dead. Phillips was one of the chief organizers of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

Maurice Ralph Hilleman was a leading American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity. According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly eight million lives each year. He has been described as one of the most influential vaccinologists ever. He has been called the "father of modern vaccines". Robert Gallo called Hilleman "the most successful vaccinologist in history". He has been described by some researchers as having saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century.

Michael Charles Chiklis is an American actor, television producer, and director. He is known for his roles as Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Detective Vic Mackey on the FX police drama The Shield (2002–2008), for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2002 and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama in 2003, and as superhero Ben Grimm / the Thing in Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007).