What is a celebrity? Is it simply someone famous, or does it take more to achieve celebrity status? A celebrity is actually a person who is widely known and of great popular interest. Our Celebrity Trivia is based upon the assumption you will know these popular individuals, although many of the “facts” may be new to you.
Table of Contents
Our article begins with Famous People Trivia which pulls information from history, art, literature, politics, and entertainment detailing what made the chosen individuals famous. Next, our section on Celebrity Trivia Facts lists information about celebrities we know from the entertainment industry and newspaper headlines. Finally, we have Celebrity Quiz Questions for testing your celebrity knowledge and that of your friends and family.
Celebrity Quiz Questions
For our Celebrity Quiz Questions, we have chosen to ask you about well-known individuals and given clues you should easily recognize. Take your time and think before answering. We have listed the answers separately so you can test yourself, your friends, and family. This list is great for a trivia game.
Questions
- Who is the actor in the 1976 thriller Taxi Driver, who ways, ““You talkin’ to me?”
- Who is the well-known English mathematician and physical scientist that became famous for his law of gravitation?
- What is the name of the Argentinian revolutionary hero, who took part in guerilla wars in Cuba and was killed fighting Bolivian troops?
- Who was the first black President of South Africa imprisoned for about 27 years for fighting apartheid and led the African National Congress to achieve a non-racist democracy?
- Who was the German who invented movable-type printing and printed the Mazarin Bible?
- Who is the London-based actor who played the lead in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi and won a Best Actor Oscar?
- Who was the Portuguese navigator and commander of the first expedition (1519) to circumnavigate the globe?
- Who was a TV and movie star, governor of California from 1967 to 1974, and the U.S. President from 1981 to 1988?
- Who was the wife of Prince Charles of Britain that died in a car accident in Paris on August 31, 1997?
- Who won the only Oscar nomination for acting in a Star Wars movie?
- Who was the architect of his country’s reconstruction after World War II and the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of West Germany?
- Which actor acted in and wrote the screenplay for the movie Rocky?
- Who was the harsh dictator who was President of Uganda in 1971-1979 and ordered deportation of 45,000 Asian residents in 1972?
- What well-known Hollywood couple starred in the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
- Who was a leader of the Russian Revolution who became the first Soviet Commissioner for Foreign affairs, was expelled from the Communist Party in 1927, and assassinated in Mexico in 1940?
- What is the name of the famous European traveler in the Far East, best remembered for his visit to the court of Kublai Khan?
- Which actress was known for the line, “I want to be alone”?
- Who is remembered as a comedy film star from London who went to the USA in 1916 and starred in City Lights, The Kid, The Gold Rush, and Limelight?
- What actor is from Hong Kong, has been compared to Bruce Lee, and made 40 films since 1976?
Famous People Trivia
A celebrity becomes someone famous when their achievement is remembered and many people recognize how important the individual’s contribution is to the world. With that in mind, we have collected some interesting trivia about famous people in many different walks of life. Some of the trivia will be familiar and some entirely new. Share what you learn with your friends and family.
- Laurence Olivier directed and acted in Henry V in 1945 and was knighted in 1947.
- Magician Harry Houdini was famous for his escape acts.
- Actor Lon Chaney was known as the “Man of Thousand Faces.”
- Auguste Rodin, was a famous sculpture, who created The Kiss, and The Thinker.
- Blind and deaf American female writer Helen Keller wrote The Story of My Life, Let Us Have Faith, and Out of the Dark.
- Thomas Alva Edison, who is credited with inventing the lightbulb, was known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”
- Christopher Reeve, famous for his role in the Superman movies, was paralyzed in a horseback riding accident.
- Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator who pleaded with both the king and queen of Spain to give him a ship to sail west to India and then discovered America in 1492.
- Maxim Gorky was a novelist, story writer, dramatist, and founder of the doctrine of Socialist Realism.
- Mao Tse-tung became famous a political leader in China and is known as the Father of Communist China.
- Mary Ann Evans wrote novels under the pen name George Eliot
- Mother Teresa worked among the dying and the destitute in India.
- Madam Eva Peron was a powerful president in Argentina.
- Marie Antoinette, an Austrian princess and wife of King Louis XVI of France, was executed in France in October 1793 by French revolutionaries.
- Karl Mark was a famous socialist thinker, wrote Das Capital, and founded Communism in Germany.
- Charles Lindberg gained fame after his first solo transatlantic flight.
- Manfred von Richthofen, a German airman, was famously known as the “‘Red Baron.”
- Margaret Thatcher, a British prime minister, became a member of Parliament 1959 after working as a research chemist.
- American astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first man to step on the moon on July 21, 1969.
- Napoleon Bonaparte, was a famous French general and emperor who had defeated Austrians and Russians and became the master of Europe.
- Ronald Reagan gained fame as a TV and movie star, became Governor of California from 1967 to 1974, and President of the USA from 1981-1988.
- Maria Montessori became famous for developing a system for educating children using “spontaneous education.”
- Joseph Stalin became the Soviet leader after the death of Lenin, led Russia for about 30 years, and was famous for his brutality.
- Martin Luther is famous for starting the Protestant Reformation in Germany.
- Joan of Arc (1482-1531) was a French peasant girl burnt as a heretic at Rouen by the British after she had a vision of bringing glory to France.
- Marie Curie was a Polish chemist and physicist who discovered radium and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911.
- Anna Pavlova is best known for immortalizing the ballet “The Dying Swan” in Swan Lake.
- Pearl S. Buck was the first woman novelist to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature.
- Florence Nightingale organized the modern system of nursing.
- Martin Luther King Jr. who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, gained fame as an integration leader, non-violent civil rights leader, and American clergyman.
- Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, who was actually Greek, gained fame as the lover of Julius Caesar, and after Caesar’s murder, Mark Antony.
- William Harvey was the famous English physician who discovered blood circulation in 1616.
- Agatha Christie became famous all over the world as a detective story writer.
- Captain William Bligh. the famous sailor whose birthplace was Plymouth, abandoned by his own mutinous crew from the ship Bounty.
- Baden Powell gained fame as the founder of the Scouts for boys in1908 and the Guides for girls in 1910.
- Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler “Man of the Year” for 1938.
- Queen Elizabeth II served in World War II as a driver and mechanic.
- American President Theodore Roosevelt (nicknamed Teddy) refused to shoot a bear cub on one of his hunting trips, and the first “Teddy Bear” was made in his honor.
- Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, did not want to be remembered after his death as a propagator of violence, thus he initiated the Nobel Prize.
- Leonardo Da Vinci, who could draw with one hand and write with the other at the same time, worked on painting Mona Lisa for fifteen years and considered it unfinished at his death in 1519.
- Albert Einstein was unable to speak fluently when he was nine and, as an adult, was once offered the Presidency of Israel.
Celebrity Trivia Facts
If you enjoy collecting trivia facts, this section will add to your store of knowledge. You may wish to go even further and research some of your own celebrity trivia facts to add to this list. We hope we have found some tidbits of information new to you. Enjoy!
- Who was the voice of Cappy In Robots?
- Who is the mother of Kate Hudson?
- Which American singer grew up on a Christmas tree farm?
- Which actor considered pursuing a career in professional wrestling, but an injury caused him to change direction?
- Who was the British royal who made headlines for wearing the same dress twice in 2012?
- Which female singer appeared on Barney and Friends in the early 2000s?
- Which Friends star was Brad Pitt’s first wife and married actor Justin Theroux in 2015?
- What does Ozzy Osbourne have tattooed on his knees?
- What is the name of the school in The Breakfast Club?
- Which actress and sex symbol was found dead in her L.A. home in 1962?
- What actor was introduced to acting by Nicolas Cage and had his first major movie role in A Nightmare On Elm Street?
- What was the name of Donald Trump’s first wife?
- Which male star of Friends attended Northwestern University?
- Which singer and actress is known as JLo?
- Which actress is the mother of Lila Grace?
- Which actress is the mother of Melanie Griffith?
- What actor married Lisa Marie Presley in 2002?
- Who is the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis?
- Who is Suri Cruise’s mother and the third wife of Tom Cruise?
- Which singer reportedly approached J. K. Rowling with the suggestion of turning the Harry Potter books into a musical?
- Which female singer was the first choice to play Tiana in The Princess and the Frog, but lost the role because she refused to audition?
- What adventure movie actor worked as a roadie for The Doors before his big Hollywood break?
- What popular female talk show hostess turned down an offer for the role of Phoebe in Friends?
- Which actor visits sick children in the hospital in the Peter Quill/Star-Lord costumes, including the jacket, which he stole from the set of Guardians of the Galaxy?
- Which actor prefers to say dialog the way he wants, so he likes to edit the punctuation of every script he gets?
- What actor earned an Academy Award for Best actor in 1996 for Leaving Las Vegas (1995) after refusing Jim Carrey’s offer to co-star in Dumb and Dumber (1994)?
- What popular actor is also a musician who has played guitar for Oasis, Marilyn Manson, and Aerosmith?
- What actor was named after Leonardo da Vinci because his pregnant mother was looking at one of his paintings in a museum in Italy when her baby first kicked her?
- Author J.K. Rowling and director Chris Columbus turned down what actor’s request to play Hagrid in the Harry Potter films, because they only wanted British and Irish actors?
- Which Star Trek actor only appeared in public once, and since he needed police rescue from thousands seeking autographs, did not repeat the experience?
- What actor witnessed a pedestrian get hit by a car that fled the scene, summoned an ambulance, followed it to the hospital where he discovered that the patient was uninsured, and paid the victim’s $7,000 emergency room bill?
- What actor originally wanted to be an astronaut and was awarded the Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award in 2006 for his contributions to raising public awareness about space programs?
- Whose acting career began when he and his brother broke into a theater in New York when he was 7 with the purpose of vandalizing it and were caught by and the theater’s artistic director who offered them roles in an upcoming show?
- Who did Pamela Anderson marry after a whirlwind four-day courtship in a non-traditional ceremony that ended with Pamela thrown in the ocean?
- Which singer dangled his baby from the third-floor balcony of a German hotel on November 20, 2002 as horrified fans gathered below?
- What trait do Paul McCartney, Whoopi Goldberg, and Bruce Willis share in common?
- Which popular actor had a stipulation in his contract that for any movie or event he did, the company hiring him also had to hire a certain number of homeless people?
- Which US actress was detained by security guards at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills in December 2001 and reportedly was found to have several articles of clothing and hair accessories totaling more than $5,000 of unpaid merchandise?
- What US actor served in the FDNY’s Engine Co. 55 in Manhattan’s Little Italy for four years and returned to Engine 55 after 9/11 to work 12-hour shifts alongside other firefighters sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center?
- What female talk show hostess was given the Biblical name Orpha at birth and graduated from Tennessee State University with a BA in Speech and Drama?
- Which female singer produced The Princess Diaries and its sequel through her production company, Brownhouse Productions?
We hope you have not only learned some new trivia facts, but enjoyed reading this article. Use your new-found knowledge of celebrity trivia in conversations or a fun trivia game with your family and friends. Have fun!
Susan majored in English with a double minor in Humanities and Business at Arizona State University and earned a Master’s degree in Educational Administration from Liberty University. She taught grades four through twelve in both public and private schools. Subjects included English, U.S. and world history and geography, math, earth and physical science, Bible, information technologies, and creative writing.
Susan has been freelance writing for over ten years, during which time she has written and edited books, newspaper articles, biographies, book reviews, guidelines, neighborhood descriptions for realtors, Power Point presentations, resumes, and numerous other projects.
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