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Theodore Roosevelt
Born
Theodore Roosevelt wrote some 35 books, including a well-regarded naval history of the War of 1812 and multi-volume The Winning of the West, while building a political career that took him to the presidency. He was also a serious field naturalist whose specimens went to the Smithsonian. His writing and natural history fed directly into the conservation policies of his presidency, including new national parks and forests.
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Ignacy Jan Paderewski
Born
Ignacy Jan Paderewski was one of the most famous concert pianists in the world, and used his celebrity and fortune to campaign for Polish independence during the First World War. In 1919 he became Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the new Polish state and signed the Treaty of Versailles. He resigned within a year and returned to the concert stage, an unusually literal case of two careers overlapping.
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C. B. Fry
Born
C. B. Fry captained England at cricket, played football for England and in an FA Cup final, and equalled the world long jump record in 1893, all while working as a journalist and editing his own magazine. He later stood for Parliament and ran a naval training ship for decades. Even generous accounts note the strain, including periods of serious mental illness.
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Albert Schweitzer
Born
Albert Schweitzer was a theologian whose The Quest of the Historical Jesus remains a landmark, and a leading Bach organist and scholar, when he retrained as a doctor and in 1913 founded a hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon. He funded it partly through organ recitals and lecture tours in Europe, keeping all three careers running for decades. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952; later critics questioned his paternalistic attitudes.
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Winston Churchill
Born
Winston Churchill supported his family largely through writing, producing journalism, biographies and multi-volume histories alongside a political career of more than sixty years, and won the 1953 Nobel prize in literature. He also took up painting in 1915 and produced some 500 canvases, exhibiting under a pseudonym. Writing paid the bills while out of office, and he openly used his histories to shape how his own record was judged.
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Paul Robeson
Born
Paul Robeson was an All-American college football player who played professionally in the NFL while studying law at Columbia, briefly worked as a lawyer, then became a celebrated concert singer and stage actor, famous for Ol' Man River and his London Othello. His civil rights and left-wing activism led the US government to revoke his passport in the 1950s, effectively ending his performing career at home.
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Denis Compton
Born
Denis Compton played Test cricket for England as one of its greatest batsmen while also playing professional football for Arsenal, winning the league title in 1948 and the FA Cup in 1950. The two seasons overlapped awkwardly, and a football knee injury eventually hampered his cricket. In the summer of 1947 he scored a record 3,816 first-class runs, a figure no one has beaten.
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Leonard Bernstein
Born
Leonard Bernstein was music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 while composing West Side Story, Candide and symphonies, and presenting the televised Young People's Concerts that introduced millions of children to classical music. He complained that conducting left too little time to compose, a tension visible across his career. Each role fed his reputation as music's great explainer.
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Maya Angelou
Born
Maya Angelou worked as a calypso singer and dancer, toured Europe in Porgy and Bess, edited an English-language newspaper in Cairo and worked as a journalist in Ghana, and co-ordinated for Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference before I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) made her a famous author. She continued acting, directing and writing screenplays alongside poetry and memoirs for the rest of her life.
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Václav Havel
Born
Václav Havel was an internationally performed absurdist playwright and a leading dissident, imprisoned several times by Czechoslovakia's communist government, which banned his plays. He wrote essays such as The Power of the Powerless while working in a brewery under surveillance. After leading the Velvet Revolution in 1989 he became president, and his writer's voice shaped a famously literary presidency.
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Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton paid his way through Harvard Medical School by writing thrillers under pseudonyms, and The Andromeda Strain was published under his own name in 1969, the year he graduated. He then worked as a film director, including Westworld, while writing Jurassic Park and creating the television drama ER. His medical training gave his fiction its technical confidence.
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Steve Martin
Born
Steve Martin has run several careers in parallel for decades: film actor and screenwriter, stand-up turned author of novels and plays, and a serious bluegrass banjo player who has won Grammy awards for his recordings and tours with the Steep Canyon Rangers. He is also a significant art collector. His banjo playing in particular is respected by musicians as more than a celebrity sideline.
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Patti Smith
Born
Patti Smith performed poetry readings and published collections before her 1975 album Horses made her a central figure of punk. She has kept recording, publishing poetry, exhibiting photographs and drawings, and writing prose; her memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award in 2010. Each discipline feeds the others, and she presents herself as a poet who happens to have a band.
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Viggo Mortensen
Born
Viggo Mortensen made his name as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings while also publishing poetry, exhibiting photographs and paintings, and releasing experimental music. In 2002 he founded Perceval Press, a small publisher of art, poetry and political writing by others. He has since directed, written and scored his own films, working across Spanish and English.
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Hugh Laurie
Born
Hugh Laurie was a Cambridge rowing blue and half of the comedy double act Fry and Laurie before becoming one of America's highest-paid television actors in House. Alongside acting he published a well-received comic thriller, The Gun Seller (1996), and released two blues albums, touring internationally with his band. He has since directed and written for television too.
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Bob Dylan
Born
Bob Dylan has toured almost continuously for decades while also painting and drawing, with major gallery exhibitions of his work, making iron gates and sculptures, writing the memoir Chronicles and hosting a radio show. He received the Nobel prize in literature in 2016 for his songwriting. The visual art is far more than a hobby, with its own museum retrospectives.
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Bo Jackson
Born
Bo Jackson won the Heisman Trophy in college, then played Major League Baseball for the Kansas City Royals and NFL football for the Los Angeles Raiders in the same years, from 1987 to 1990, becoming an All-Star in both sports. A hip injury on the football field in 1991 ended his NFL career and limited his baseball. He remains the benchmark for professional two-sport careers.
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Deion Sanders
Deion Sanders played in both the NFL and Major League Baseball through much of the 1990s, and is the only person to have played in both a Super Bowl and a World Series. In 1992 he played an NFL game in Miami and flew to Pittsburgh the same day hoping to join a baseball play-off game. He later became a college football head coach, most recently at the University of Colorado.
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Donald Glover
Born
Donald Glover wrote for 30 Rock and acted in Community while releasing music as Childish Gambino, then created, wrote, directed and starred in the series Atlanta. His single This Is America won the Grammy for record of the year in 2019, the same period in which Atlanta won Emmys. Few performers have reached the top in music and television writing at the same time.
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