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Joseph Conrad
Born
Joseph Conrad, born Józef Korzeniowski to Polish parents in the Russian Empire, spent about twenty years as a merchant seaman, mostly on British ships, learning English as his third language in his twenties. He settled in England, published his first novel, Almayer's Folly, in 1895, and wrote Heart of Darkness and Nostromo in a language he once said he never fully mastered. His sea years supplied most of his material.
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Joseph Pulitzer
Born
Joseph Pulitzer arrived in the United States from Hungary in 1864 as a teenage recruit for the Union Army, speaking little English. Working in a German-language newspaper in St Louis, he learnt journalism, then bought and built the St Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World into mass-circulation papers. His will funded the Columbia journalism school and the prizes that bear his name.
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Alexander Graham Bell
Born
Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish teacher of the deaf like his father, emigrated with his family to Canada in 1870 for health reasons and then taught in Boston, where he worked on transmitting speech electrically. He patented the telephone in 1876 with crucial help from his assistant Thomas Watson and investors including his future father-in-law. He continued to work in deaf education alongside his inventions.
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Nikola Tesla
Born
Nikola Tesla, a Serbian engineer born in what is now Croatia, arrived in New York in 1884 with little money, briefly worked for Thomas Edison, then struck out on his own. His alternating current motor and system, licensed to George Westinghouse, powered the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the Niagara Falls power station. He died poor in a New York hotel in 1943, but his name lives on.
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Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker left the segregated United States for Paris in 1925 and became a star of the Folies Bergère within two years. She took French citizenship, worked for the French Resistance during the Second World War, and was later decorated for it; in 2021 she became the first Black woman honoured in the Panthéon. France gave her a career that American racism had denied her, and she repaid it.
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Alfred Hitchcock
Born
Alfred Hitchcock was already Britain's leading director, with The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, when producer David O. Selznick brought him to Hollywood in 1939. Rebecca won the best picture Oscar the following year, and the American studio system's resources made possible Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho. He became a US citizen in 1955, though he kept his London accent and cockney humour.
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Billy Wilder
Born
Billy Wilder, a Jewish journalist and screenwriter in Berlin, fled the Nazis in 1933, reaching Hollywood in 1934 with almost no English; he learnt it partly by listening to the radio. Sharing a flat with fellow exile Peter Lorre, he broke in as a writer, then directed Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. His outsider's ear for American slang became his trademark.
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James Baldwin
Born
James Baldwin left New York for Paris in 1948 with a few dollars, to escape American racism and homophobia and to write. There he finished Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and wrote Giovanni's Room. He later lived for many years in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France, returning to the US for the civil rights movement. Distance, he said, let him see his own country clearly.
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Rudolf Nureyev
Born
Rudolf Nureyev, star of the Kirov Ballet, defected at Paris airport in 1961 while on tour, leaving his family behind in the Soviet Union. In London his partnership with Margot Fonteyn at the Royal Ballet made both of them international celebrities, and he later directed the Paris Opera Ballet from 1983 to 1989. Fonteyn's willingness to dance with him gave the newcomer a ready-made Western stage.
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Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Born
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne to a Jewish family who escaped to England in 1939. She married an Indian architect, moved to Delhi in 1951 and wrote novels about Indian life, including Heat and Dust, which won the Booker Prize in 1975. Later moving to New York, she wrote screenplays for Merchant Ivory, winning two Oscars. Few writers have worked so successfully across three countries.
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Martina Navratilova
Born
Martina Navratilova defected from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1975, aged 18, and was stripped of her citizenship. In her new country she changed tennis with a fitness and diet regime then unusual, won 18 Grand Slam singles titles including nine at Wimbledon, and became one of the first top athletes to come out publicly. She gained US citizenship in 1981.
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Claudia Roden
Claudia Roden grew up in a Syrian Jewish family in Cairo and came to London as a student in the 1950s; her family followed after the Suez crisis forced many Jews to leave Egypt. Collecting recipes from fellow exiles, she trained as an artist but became a food writer, publishing A Book of Middle Eastern Food in 1968. Her later books on Jewish, Spanish and Italian food made her one of the most respected cookery writers in Britain.
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Prue Leith
Born
Prue Leith left South Africa for London in the 1960s, started a catering business from her flat and opened the restaurant Leith's in Notting Hill in 1969, later winning a Michelin star, and founded Leith's School of Food and Wine. She went on to write novels, sit on company boards and, in 2017, join The Great British Bake Off as a judge. Her career is a sustained case of building a reputation from scratch in a new country.
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Yotam Ottolenghi
Born
Yotam Ottolenghi grew up in Jerusalem and was studying for a doctorate in philosophy and literature when he moved to London in 1997 and enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu instead. With partners including the Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi he opened the first Ottolenghi deli in Notting Hill in 2002, and books such as Plenty and Jerusalem changed how British home cooks use vegetables and spices.
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Marcus Samuelsson
Marcus Samuelsson was born in Ethiopia, adopted by a Swedish family and trained in Gothenburg and Swiss and French kitchens before moving to New York in 1994. At 24 he became executive chef of Aquavit and earned a three-star New York Times review. His Harlem restaurant Red Rooster, opened in 2010, deliberately hires locally and celebrates the neighbourhood's food culture.
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Zaha Hadid
Born
Zaha Hadid studied mathematics in Beirut before moving to London to train at the Architectural Association, where she taught and set up her practice in 1980. For years her designs won competitions but went unbuilt, including a cancelled opera house in Cardiff. Her persistence paid off with the London Aquatics Centre, the MAXXI in Rome, and in 2004 she became the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize. She died in 2016.
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Anish Kapoor
Born
Anish Kapoor grew up in Mumbai and spent time in Israel training as an engineer before moving to London in 1973 to study art at Hornsey and Chelsea. He represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale, won the Turner Prize in 1991 and made large public works such as Cloud Gate in Chicago and the ArcelorMittal Orbit for the 2012 London Olympics. London gave him the art schools and galleries that launched him.
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Hans Zimmer
Born
Hans Zimmer left Germany for London as a teenager, played keyboards in bands and wrote advertising jingles, then learnt film scoring by assisting the composer Stanley Myers. After moving to Los Angeles, his score for Rain Man (1988) launched a Hollywood career that includes The Lion King, Gladiator and Dune, with Oscars for The Lion King and Dune. His studio has trained many younger composers.
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Ang Lee
Born
Ang Lee moved from Taiwan to the United States in 1979 to study theatre and film, then spent about six years unemployed, writing scripts while his wife, a microbiologist, supported the family. Script competition wins led to Pushing Hands (1991), and he went on to direct Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, winning two best director Oscars. His career moves easily between Chinese- and English-language film.
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