13 Famous People Who Died A Lot Later Than You Think
By
Samantha in
History
On 24th December 2015
It can be surprisingly easy to get mixed up with history with all those names and dates floating around. But the lives and times of great people often define history, so you need to have an idea of when people lived and died to understand how they shaped the times in which they lived — and how the times shaped them.
The bigger problem with history, though, is how removed we often feel from it. Things that happened hundreds of years ago can be fascinating, but it's difficult to relate to those times — and to the people who lived way back then.
The good news about mixing up history is that sometimes it's on your side — some of those great people lived closer to our times than you would think.
#1. Pablo Picasso
We always think of the artistic masters as being far removed, living back in the Renaissance, but Picasso was born in 1881 and worked in the 20th century. He completed perhaps his greatest work, Guernica, in 1937, and worked steadily up to his death in 1973 at the age of 91.
#2. Charlie Chaplin
One of the greatest film stars in the history of Hollywood, Chaplin became a start when he was still quite young. Born in 1889, he rose to stardom before the age of 20, but began to fade away after about 1940. He appeared in a handful of films in the '50s and '60s and died in 1977.
#3. Thomas Edison
It's sometimes easier to remember what the man left the world than when he lived. And Edison gave the world so much: the light bulb, alkaline batteries, the telegraph, motion picture cameras, recorded music, and much more. Many of his greatest inventions came along in the 1870s and '80s, but he didn't die until 1931.
#4. J.R.R. Tolkien
He might be better remembered in our time than he was in his own since the adaption of his The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which many consider the beginnings of the High Fantasy genre, into massive hit films. They seem like such time-worn books, but The Hobbit was published in 1937, and Tolkien himself lived until 1973.
#5. Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr made her name as a screen siren in the late '30s and early '40s, but she made some of her greatest contributions to the world of communications technology. Along with composer George Antheil, Hedy patented a system that would inhibit the Germans' ability to block radio-controlled missiles during World War II. That technology became crucial to military communications and cell phone technology. She passed away in 2000.
#6. Wyatt Earp
Yes, there was a real Wyatt Earp. He wasn't made up just for the silver screen. He really did participate in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881. Unlike so many gunfighters in the Old West, Earp survived to a ripe old age and lived well into the 20th century, finally passing away in 1929.
#7. Albert Einstein
Born in 1879, Einstein published his first four papers containing elements of his general relativity theory in 1905, four years before his 30th birthday. He finished his theory in 1915 and brought home the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. He lived to see his work used to build the atomic bomb and passed away in 1955, around the same time rock and roll was being born.
#8. Salvador Dalí
Probably the best-known surrealist painter, Dalà was as much renowned for his eccentric manner as his wildly imaginative paintings. He completed his most famous work, The Persistence of Memory, in 1931, but lived until 1989.
#9. Mark Twain
We have a clear picture of Mark Twain from many depictions in pop culture an old man with wild white hair and a walrus-like mustache in a white suit, holding court in the days of the paddle-wheeler steamboats. While he did live during those times, and his most famous works were published in the 1880s, he continued to work into the 20th century before passing away in 1910.
#10. Claude Monet
Impressionism is firmly rooted in the 19th century because of Monet's work in the 1870s and '80s, when he and a group of like-minded painters established the movement, and he painted his famous water lilies in the 1890s. Yet he lived beyond World War I and passed away in 1926, aged 86.
#11. Frank Sinatra
He's an icon who defined the '50s and '60s, the smoothest crooner ever to pick up a microphone, a big-time box office draw, and he lived far longer than you would have thought, almost making it into the 21st century he passed away in 1998.
#12. Ansel Adams
The man who captured the West on camera, Ansel Adams' photos tell the tale of the nation's expansion from the 1920s through '50s. His most famous photos come from his travels through the national parks taken in the 1940s, when he was under contract with the Department of the Interior. He faded from the spotlight somewhat as he focused on reprints of his earlier iconic work as requested by museums, and he passed away in 1984.
#13. Orson Welles
Quite possibly the last great auteur, Orson Welles did it all in Hollywood, writing and directing some of the greatest films ever to grace the silver screen: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man, Touch of Evil, and so on. Although he never stopped working, his career lost its luster and he battled some weight issues later in life, so it's easy to see how he could have been gone sooner. His last film was at the opposite end of his early work's critical success: 1985's Transformers: The Movie. He passed away the same year.
