Did you know about Rupert Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch was also the owner of Sky, 21st Century Fox, and the now-defunct News of the World.
Famous Birthdays on March 11
March 11 has 154 recorded notable births across history, from 1278 to 2004. This focused page highlights 20 people with the strongest available profile context.
1931 — Rupert Murdoch
Australian-American businessman and media magnate
By thisDay.info Editorial Team · — Wikipedia
Famous Birthdays
154 source records
1278 – 2004
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Today in history
Major events on March 11
See what else happened on this day in history.
Did you know about Anton Yelchin
Anton Yelchin began his career as a child actor, appearing as the lead of the mystery drama film Hearts in Atlantis (2001) and a series regular on the Showtime comedy-drama Huff (2004–2006).
Did you know about Didier Drogba
With a record of scoring 10 goals in 10 finals, Drogba has been called the "ultimate big game player".
Did you know about Greg Olsen
Greg Olsen played college football for the Miami Hurricanes and was selected by the Chicago Bears in the first round of the 2007 NFL draft.
Did you know about Antonin Scalia
For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court.
More major people born on March 11
Notable people are ranked by substantive profile depth and public notability.
1989
Anton Yelchin
Russian-American actor (died 2016)
Anton Viktorovich Yelchin was an American actor. Born in the Soviet Union to a Russian Jewish family, he emigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of six months. He began his career as a child actor, appearing as the lead of the mystery drama film Hearts in Atlantis (2001) and a series regular on the Showtime comedy-drama Huff (2004–2006). Yelchin landed higher-profile film roles in 2009, portraying Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek reboot and Kyle Reese in Terminator Salvation. He reprised his role as Chekov in the sequels Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) and Star Trek Beyond (2016).
1978
Didier Drogba
Ivorian footballer
Didier Yves Drogba Tébily is an Ivorian former professional footballer who played as a striker. He is the all-time top scorer and former captain of the Ivory Coast national team. Best known for his career at Chelsea, he is the club’s all-time top foreign goalscorer and their fourth-highest goalscorer of all time. Widely regarded as one of the greatest African players of all time, Drogba was named the African Footballer of the Year twice in 2006 and 2009. He was named in the 2007 FIFA World XI. In 2022, he was inducted into the Premier League Hall of Fame. With a record of scoring 10 goals in 10 finals, Drogba has been called the "ultimate big game player".
1985
Greg Olsen
American football player and commentator
Gregory Walter Olsen Jr. is an American professional football sportscaster and former tight end who played for 14 seasons in the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Miami Hurricanes and was selected by the Chicago Bears in the first round of the 2007 NFL draft. Olsen played most of his career for the Carolina Panthers, with whom he made three Pro Bowls, and became the first tight end in NFL history to record three consecutive seasons with at least 1,000 receiving yards. Olsen played his final season with the Seattle Seahawks in 2020. Following his retirement Olsen joined Fox as a sportscaster and is formerly the lead color commentator for the NFL on Fox.
1936
Antonin Scalia
American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (died 2016)
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
1965
Wallace Langham
American actor
James Wallace Langham II is an American actor. He is known for his roles in television shows, playing the role of Phil the Head Writer on The Larry Sanders Show (1992–1998), Josh Blair in Veronica's Closet (1997–2000), and as David Hodges on the crime drama television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015), a role he would reprise in CSI: Vegas (2021). He began his career in 1985 under the stage name Wally Ward before reverting to his real name in 1989. He would have roles in films such as Weird Science, Michael, Daddy Day Care, Little Miss Sunshine, The Social Network and Ford v Ferrari, and make appearances in series such as ER, The West Wing, For All Mankind and Physical.
1932
Nigel Lawson
English journalist and politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer (died 2023)
Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby was a British politician, journalist and climate change denier. A member of the Conservative Party, he served as Member of Parliament for Blaby in Leicestershire from 1974 to 1992, and served in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet from 1981 to 1989. Prior to entering the Cabinet, he served as the Financial Secretary to the Treasury from May 1979 until his promotion to Secretary of State for Energy. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in June 1983 and served until his resignation in October 1989. In both Cabinet posts, Lawson was a key proponent of Thatcher's policies of privatisation of several key industries.
1926
Ralph Abernathy
American minister and activist (died 1990)
Ralph David Abernathy Sr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. Being a leader of the civil rights movement, Abernathy was a close friend and mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. and collaborated with him and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led and co-created the Montgomery bus boycott and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Abernathy became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968 and led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., in addition to other marches and demonstrations for disenfranchised Americans. He also served as an advisory committee member of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
1887
Raoul Walsh
American actor and director (died 1980)
Raoul Walsh was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), and the brother of silent cinema actor George Walsh. He portrayed John Wilkes Booth in the silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915) and directed the widescreen epic The Big Trail (1930) starring John Wayne in his first leading role, The Roaring Twenties starring James Cagney, Gladys George, Priscilla Lane and Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra (1941) starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart, and White Heat (1949) starring James Cagney, Edmond O'Brien, Virginia Mayo and Margaret Wycherly. He directed his last film in 1964. His work has been noted as influences on directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese.
1925
Margaret Oakley Dayhoff
American biochemist and academic (died 1983)
Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff was an American biophysicist and a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. Dayhoff was a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center and a noted research biochemist at the National Biomedical Research Foundation, where she pioneered the application of mathematics and computational methods to the field of biochemistry. She dedicated her career to applying the evolving computational technologies to support advances in biology and medicine, most notably the creation of protein and nucleic acid databases and tools to interrogate the databases. She originated one of the first substitution matrices, point accepted mutations (PAM). The one-letter code used for amino acids was developed by her, reflecting an attempt to reduce the size of the data files used to describe amino acid sequences in an era of punch-card computing.
1963
Gary Barnett
English footballer and manager
Gary Lloyd Barnett is an English former professional footballer and football coach. He made nearly 400 appearances in the Football League playing as a midfielder for Oxford United, Wimbledon, Fulham, Huddersfield Town, Leyton Orient and Kidderminster Harriers. After leaving Leyton Orient in the summer of 1995, he was on trial with Norwegian club IL Hødd. As player-manager of League of Wales club Barry Town, he was honoured with the League of Wales Manager of the Year award in three consecutive seasons, for leading the club to a succession of domestic honours and to the first round proper of the 1996–97 UEFA Cup.
1876
Carl Ruggles
American composer and painter (died 1971)
Carl Ruggles was an American composer, painter and teacher. His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music. His method of atonal counterpoint was based on a non-serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number of eight pitch classes intervened. He is considered a founder of the ultramodernist movement of American composers that included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, among others. He had no formal musical education, yet was an extreme perfectionist—writing music at a painstakingly slow rate and leaving behind a very small output.
1982
Thora Birch
American actress, producer, and director
Thora Birch is an American actress. She made her film debut with a starring role in Purple People Eater (1988) and won a Young Artist Award for "Best Actress Under Nine Years of Age". Birch rose to prominence as a child star during the 1990s through a string of parts in films, such as Paradise (1991), Patriot Games (1992), Hocus Pocus (1993), Monkey Trouble (1994), Now and Then (1995), and Alaska (1996). Her breakthrough into adult-oriented roles came with her portrayal of Jane Burnham in American Beauty (1999), for which she was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress.
1987
Ngonidzashe Makusha
Zimbabwean sprinter and long jumper
Ngonidzashe Makusha is a Zimbabwean sprinter and long jumper. He is the national record holder over 100 m and long jump for Zimbabwe with 9.89 s (+1.3 m/s) and 8.40 m (0.0 m/s), respectively. Both performances were achieved during the 2011 NCAA Division I Championships in Des Moines, Iowa where he completed the 100 m - long jump double gold. Makusha was one of the only four, now five, athletes to win the 100 m - long jump double gold at the NCAA championships. The four others are DeHart Hubbard (1925), Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis (1981), and Jarrion Lawson (2016).
1980
Rich Hill
American baseball player
Richard Joseph Hill, nicknamed "Dick Mountain", is an American former professional baseball pitcher. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Chicago Cubs, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Indians, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, New York Yankees, Oakland Athletics, Los Angeles Dodgers, Minnesota Twins, Tampa Bay Rays, New York Mets, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Diego Padres, and Kansas City Royals. He is tied with Edwin Jackson for the MLB record by playing for fourteen teams. He played during each MLB season from 2005 through 2025, and he was the oldest active MLB player in 2024 and 2025.
1893
Wanda Gág
American author and illustrator (died 1946)
Wanda Hazel Gág was an American artist, author, translator, and illustrator. She is best known for writing and illustrating the children's book Millions of Cats, the oldest American picture book still in print. Gág was also a noted print-maker, receiving international recognition and awards. Growing Pains, a book of excerpts from the diaries of her teen and young adult years, received widespread critical acclaim. Two of her books were awarded Newbery Honors and two received Caldecott Honors. The New York Public Library included Millions of Cats on its 2013 list of 100 Great Children's Books.
1981
LeToya Luckett
American singer-songwriter and actress
LeToya Nicole Luckett-Coles is an American R&B singer and actress. She rose to fame in the late 1990s as a founding member of the R&B girl group Destiny's Child, one of the world's best-selling girl groups of all time. As a member of Destiny's Child, she achieved four US Top 10 hit singles, "No, No, No", "Bills, Bills, Bills", "Jumpin', Jumpin'", and "Say My Name", sold over 25 million records, and won two Grammy Awards. In the 2000s, she began her solo career after leaving the group and signing a record deal with Capitol Records.
1929
Timothy Carey
American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (died 1994)
Timothy Agoglia Carey was an American film and television character actor who was typically cast as manic or violent characters who are driven to extremes. He is particularly known for his collaborations with Stanley Kubrick in the films The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), and for appearing in the two John Cassavetes directed films Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). Other notable film credits include Crime Wave (1954), East of Eden (1955), One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), Head (1968) and The Outfit (1973).
1945
Dock Ellis
American baseball player and coach (died 2008)
Dock Phillip Ellis Jr. was an American professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball as a right-handed pitcher from 1968 through 1979, most notably as a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates teams that won five National League Eastern Division titles in six years between 1970 and 1975 and won the World Series in 1971. Ellis also played for the New York Yankees, Oakland Athletics, Texas Rangers and New York Mets. In his MLB career, Ellis accumulated a 138–119 (.537) record, a 3.46 earned run average, and 1,136 strikeouts.
1815
Anna Bochkoltz
German operatic soprano, voice teacher and composer (died 1879)
Anna Juliane Bochkoltz was a German operatic soprano, voice teacher and composer. She performed her first concert in 1843, then studied in Brussels and Paris. After singing concerts in Paris, London and Berlin, she appeared in the 1850s on opera stages in Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, Munich and Coburg. She was known for the range of her voice, and was regarded as one of the important dramatic coloratura sopranos of her era, appearing as Mozart's Donna Anna, Beethoven's Fidelio and Bellini's Norma. She later taught singing in Vienna, Strasbourg and Paris.