Famous Birthdays on July 15

Gabriel Jesús Iglesias, nicknamed Fluffy, is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He has produced a number of stand-up specials for television outlets such as Comedy Central and Netflix, including I'm Not Fat... I'm Fluffy, and Hot and Fluffy. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous live-action and animated TV shows and films, including starring in the sitcom Mr. Iglesias on Netflix, playing Tobias in the 2012 movie Magic Mike and its 2015 sequel, and providing the voice of Speedy Gonzales in Space Jam: A New Legacy. He was also the host of the shows Stand Up Revolution on Comedy Central and Fluffy's Food Adventures on Fuse. In 2018, Iglesias was one of the top 10 highest-paid comedians in the world.

Marc Steven Bell, better known as Marky Ramone, is an American drummer. He began playing in hard rock bands in the New York City area, notably Dust and Estus. He was asked to drum for the punk rock band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. He replaced drummer Tommy Ramone in the Ramones in 1978 and played with the band from 1978 to 1983 and 1987 to 1996: their longest-serving drummer. He has also played drums for other punk rock and heavy metal bands including his own band, Marky Ramone and the Intruders. As of 2026, he is one of three surviving members of the band, the others being Richie Ramone and C.J. Ramone. He continues to keep the Ramones' legacy alive around the world with his band Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg.

Tristan Paul Mack Wilds is an American actor, singer-songwriter, and record producer. He is known for his roles as Michael Lee on the HBO original drama series, The Wire, and as Dixon Wilson on the CW teen drama series, 90210. He was also featured in the Adele music video for "Hello". As a recording artist, he signed with record producer Salaam Remi's Louder than Life Recordings, an imprint of Sony Music to release his debut studio album, New York: A Love Story (2013), which narrowly entered the Billboard 200 and received a nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 56th Annual Grammy Awards. Wilds' second album, AfterHours (2017), was released independently, and failed to chart.

Ronald Gene Simmons Sr. was an American spree mass murderer and former military serviceman who perpetrated an attack that killed 16 people, including 14 members of his own family, over a week in December 1987 in Arkansas. The killings, centered at his home near Dover and later at several public locations, remain the deadliest familicide in United States history, and the second deadliest mass murder in Arkansas history, after the Elaine massacre of 1919. Simmons, a retired U.S. Navy and Air Force veteran, was convicted in two trials, sentenced to death, waived all appeals, and was executed by lethal injection in 1990 — the first person executed by that method in Arkansas. His refusal to appeal led to the U.S. Supreme Court case Whitmore v. Arkansas.

Vivian Juanita Malone Jones was the first Black American student to graduate from the University of Alabama, in 1965. She and James Hood were the first Black students able to enroll at the university since Autherine Lucy and Pollie Myers initially strove to desegregate the school. Malone became famous when George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, attempted to physically block her and Hood from enrolling at the all-white university. Malone faced threats and ostracism at the university but successfully graduated in two years with a Bachelor of Arts in Business Management. Throughout her career, Malone continued to work for civil rights causes. She worked for various federal agencies like the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency, and served as executive director of the Voter Education Project.

Inigo Jones was an English architect who was the first significant architect in England in the early modern era and the first to employ Vitruvian rules of Proportion (architecture) and symmetry in his buildings. As the most notable architect in England, Jones was the first person to introduce the classical architecture of Rome and the Italian Renaissance to England. He left his mark on London by his design of single buildings, such as the Queen's House which is the first building in England designed in a pure classical style, and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, as well as the layout for Covent Garden square which became a model for future developments in the West End. He made major contributions to stage design by his work as a theatrical designer for several dozen masques, most by royal command and many in collaboration with Ben Jonson.

Brenda Milner was a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. As of 2020, she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as one of the founders of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development. She received the Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience in 2009, and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, together with John O'Keefe, and Marcus E. Raichle, in 2014. She turned 100 in July 2018.

Dorothy Fields was an American librettist and lyricist. She wrote more than 400 songs for Broadway musicals and films. Her best-known pieces include "The Way You Look Tonight" (1936), "A Fine Romance" (1936), "On the Sunny Side of the Street" (1930), "Don't Blame Me" (1948), "Pick Yourself Up" (1936), "I'm in the Mood for Love" (1935), "You Couldn't Be Cuter" (1938) and "Big Spender" (1966). Throughout her career, she collaborated with various influential figures in the American musical theater, including Jerome Kern, Cy Coleman, Irving Berlin, Arthur Schwartz, and Jimmy McHugh. Along with Ann Ronell, Dana Suesse, Bernice Petkere, and Kay Swift, she was one of the first successful Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood female songwriters.

Anthony Erwin Randolph Jr. is an American and naturalized Slovenian former professional basketball player. He represented the senior Slovenian national basketball team, winning the 2017 EuroBasket with them. Born in Germany to two American parents who served in the US military there, Randolph's family eventually relocated to the United States, where he grew up in Pasadena, California. The family later moved to Dallas, Texas, where Randolph soon became a standout at Woodrow Wilson High School, eventually being recruited by the LSU Tigers. After one year, Randolph left college, and entered the 2008 NBA draft, where he was chosen as the fourteenth pick overall by the Golden State Warriors. In 2016, he earned an All-EuroLeague Second Team selection.

Wharton Esherick was an American artist and designer. An artistic polymath, he worked in a wide variety of art media including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. His design works range from architectural interiors to handheld, tactile objects like light pulls and chess pieces. Esherick is best known for his wood furniture, which synthesizes modernist sculptural form with functional craft. His influence was keenly felt within the genre of Postwar studio craft, where he has been called the “father of studio furniture” and the “dean of American craftsmen.” The sculptor and furniture designer Wendell Castle cited Esherick as a formative influence. Castle credited Esherick with demonstrating that "furniture could be a form of sculpture," the "inherent tree characteristics in the utilization of wood," and the "importance of the entire sculptural environment."

Sir John Fowler, 1st Baronet, KCMG, LLD, FRSE was an English civil engineer specialising in the construction of railways and railway infrastructure. In the 1850s and 1860s, he was engineer for the world's first underground railway, London's Metropolitan Railway, built by the "cut-and-cover" method under city streets. In the 1880s, he was chief engineer for the Forth Bridge, which opened in 1890. Fowler's was a long and eminent career, spanning most of the 19th century's railway expansion, and he was engineer, adviser or consultant to many British and foreign railway companies and governments. He was the youngest president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, between 1865 and 1867, and his major works represent a lasting legacy of Victorian engineering.

The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and its variants were the highest awards in the military and paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany during World War II. The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross was awarded for a wide range of reasons and across all ranks, from a senior commander for skilled leadership of his troops in battle to a low-ranking soldier for a single act of extreme gallantry. A total of 7,321 awards were made between its first presentation on 30 September 1939 and its last bestowal on 17 June 1945. This number is based on the analysis and acceptance of the order commission of the Association of Knight's Cross Recipients (AKCR). Presentations were made to members of the three military branches of the Wehrmacht—the Heer (Army), Kriegsmarine (Navy) and Luftwaffe —as well as the Waffen-SS, the Reichsarbeitsdienst and the Volkssturm. There were also 43 recipients in the military forces of allies of the Third Reich.

Emmeline Pankhurst was a British political activist who organised the British suffragette movement and helped women to win the right to vote in Great Britain and Ireland in 1918, partially due to her role in the White Feather Campaign. In 1999, Time named her as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating that "she shaped an idea of women for our time" and "shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back". She was widely criticised for her militant tactics, and historians disagree about their effectiveness, but her work is recognised as a crucial element in achieving women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.

Ashoke Sen FRS is an Indian theoretical physicist and ICTS-Infosys Madhava Chair Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore. A former distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Prayagraj, he is also an honorary fellow in National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) India. He is also a Morningstar Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is string theory. He was among the first recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for opening the path to the realization that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory".

Sir Harrison Birtwistle was an English composer of contemporary classical music best known for his operas, often based on mythological subjects. Among his many compositions, his better known works include The Triumph of Time (1972) and the operas The Mask of Orpheus (1986), Gawain (1991), and The Minotaur (2008). The last of these was ranked by music critics at The Guardian in 2019 as the third-best piece of the 21st century. Even his compositions that were not written for the stage often showed a theatrical approach. A performance of his saxophone concerto Panic during the BBC's Last Night of the Proms caused "national notoriety". He received many international awards and honorary degrees.

Aníbal António Cavaco Silva is a Portuguese economist and politician who served as the president of Portugal from 2006 to 2016, and as prime minister of Portugal, from 1985 to 1995. His 10-year tenure was the longest of any prime minister since Salazar, and the longest for a freely elected prime minister in Portugal's republican history. He was the first Portuguese prime minister to win an absolute parliamentary majority under the current constitutional system. He is most recognized for guiding Portugal into the European Union, liberalizing the Portuguese economy and improving infrastructures across the country. As prime minister, his style and policies came to be known as Cavacoism.

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath, whose areas of interest included sociology, civil engineering, economics, political science, and philosophy. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices, and was one of the minds behind the Lausanne School of economics. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term elite in social analysis and contributed to elite theory. He has been described as "one of the last Renaissance scholars. Trained in physics and mathematics, he became a polymath whose genius radiated into nearly all other major fields of knowledge."

Lana Parrilla is an American actress. She was a regular cast member in the fifth season of the ABC sitcom Spin City (2000–2001) and in the fourth season of 24 (2005), and starred in Boomtown (2002–2003), Windfall (2006), Swingtown (2008), and as Dr. Eva Zambrano in the short-lived medical drama Miami Medical (2010), and as The Evil Queen / Regina Mills in the ABC fantasy drama series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018). Among her awards and nominations is a 2012 ALMA Award win for Outstanding TV Actress—Drama. In 2021, she played the role of Rita Castillo in the second season of Why Women Kill.

Che Puan Besar Hajah Haminah binti Haji Hamidun, formerly known as Sultanah Haminah is the former Sultanah of Kedah and the widow of Sultan Abdul Halim Mua'dzam Shah. Born as a commoner, she married Sultan Abdul Halim on 25 December 1975 as his second wife. She served as the 14th Raja Permaisuri Agong from 2011 to 2016, during her husband's second term as Yang di-Pertuan Agong, the Malaysian federal head of state. After her husband's death in September 2017, his successor and her brother-in-law Sultan Sallehuddin, bestowed upon her the title Che Puan Besar of Kedah, roughly equivalent to the queen dowager.