Famous birthdays
Famous people born on January 17
Short answer
Well-known people born on January 17 include Benjamin Franklin (1706), Muhammad Ali (1942), Michelle Obama (1964) and Jim Carrey (1962). Our list below has 102 people for this date, most widely covered first.
This list covers people whose Wikidata record gives January 17 as their exact birth date and who have articles in at least 28 Wikipedia language editions. The earliest birth year here is 1600 (Pedro Calderón de la Barca) and the most recent is 2003 (Robin Roefs). The most common fields on this date: football, actress, actor.
Who was born on January 17?
- Benjamin Franklin 1706 American polymath and statesman
- Muhammad Ali 1942 American boxer
- Michelle Obama 1964 Lawyer and former First Lady of the United States
- Jim Carrey 1962 Canadian-American actor and comedian
- David Lloyd George 1863 Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922
- Pedro Calderón de la Barca 1600 Spanish dramatist
- Betty White 1922 American actress and comedian
- Eartha Kitt 1927 American singer and actress
- Dalida 1933 Egyptian-French singer and actress
- Katalin Karikó 1955 Hungarian biochemist
- Álvaro Arbeloa 1983 Spanish football manager and player
- Tabaré Vázquez 1940 President of Uruguay from 2005 to 2010 and from 2015 to 2020
- Steve Harvey 1957 American television presenter, comedian, actor, and author
- Pietro Parolin 1955 Italian Roman Catholic priest, cardinal and Secretary of State of the Holy See
- James Earl Jones 1931 American actor
- Stanisław August Poniatowski 1732 King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania
- Françoise Hardy 1944 French singer
- Dwyane Wade 1982 American basketball player
- Enzo Fernández 2001 Argentine footballer
- Sandra Mason 1949 1st president of Barbados
- George Stigler 1911 American economist
- Alain Badiou 1937 French writer and philosopher
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 1954 26th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services since 2025
- Douglas Hyde 1860 First President of Ireland; historian, poet, and folklorist
- Nobuyuki Kojima 1966 Japanese association football player
- Naveen Andrews 1969 British actor
- René Préval 1943 Ex-President of Haiti
- Louis Couturat 1868 French logician, mathematician, philosopher and linguist
- Maia Chiburdanidze 1961 Georgian chess grandmaster
- Taizo Kawamoto 1914 Japanese association football player and manager
- Ryuichi Sakamoto 1952 Japanese composer, musician, social activist, and former student activist
- August Weismann 1834 German evolutionary biologist
- Oleksandr Usyk 1987 Ukrainian boxer
- Luis Echeverría 1922 57th President of Mexico
- Mack Sennett 1880 Canadian-American actor, producer and director
- Andy Kaufman 1949 American entertainer
- Jake Paul 1997 American YouTuber and boxer
- Jaime Rodríguez Jiménez 1959 Salvadoran footballer
- Michelle Fairley 1964 Northern Irish actress
- Davíð Oddsson 1948 Icelandic politician
- Héctor Moreno 1988 Mexican association football player
- Mircea Snegur 1940 Moldovan politician
- Nikolay Zhukovsky 1847 Russian scientist in mechanics and aerohydrodinamics
- Borja Iglesias 1993 Spanish footballer
- Simone Simons 1985 Dutch singer
- Kip Keino 1940 Kenyan athlete
- Anita Borg 1949 American computer scientist
- Guarino Guarini 1624 Italian mathematician and architect
- Rafał Trzaskowski 1972 Polish politician, Mayor of Warsaw since 2018, presidential candidate for Poland in…
- Genndy Tartakovsky 1970 Russian-American cinema and television animator, director and producer
- Nevil Shute 1899 British writer and engineer
- M. G. Ramachandran 1917 Film actor, chief minister of Tamil Nadu
- Alfred Radcliffe-Brown 1881 British anthropologist
- Kelly Marie Tran 1989 American actress
- Lovro Majer 1998 Croatian association football player
- Vasily Radlov 1837 German-born Russian turkologist and ethnographer
- Lucy Boynton 1994 British actress
- José Sá 1993 Portuguese footballer
- Jan Guillou 1944 Swedish author and journalist
- Lukas Moodysson 1969 Swedish writer and film director
- Khrystyna Soloviy 1993 Ukrainian singer
- Denis O'Hare 1962 American actor
- Mick Taylor 1949 British guitarist, former member of The Rolling Stones
- François Joseph Gossec 1734 French composer and conductor
- Manasseh Sogavare 1955 Solomon Islander politician, prime minister of Solomon Islands (2000–2001, 2006–2007,…
- Willa Fitzgerald 1991 American actress
- Richard Burns 1971 British rally driver
- Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber 1739 German naturalist
- David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty 1871 Royal Navy officer
- Daniel Diges 1981 Spanish musician and actor
- Charles Brockden Brown 1771 American novelist, historian and editor
- Vidal Sassoon 1928 British hairstylist
- Mohammad Shtayyeh 1958 Former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Government under Abbas and Fattah
- Nikolaus von Falkenhorst 1885 German general
- Javed Akhtar 1945 Indian writer, poet and lyricist
- José María Balcázar 1943 Peruvian lawyer and politician, president of Peru (feb.-jul. 2026)
- Susanna Hoffs 1959 American singer-songwriter, musician, and actress
- Leigh Whannell 1977 Australian filmmaker and actor
- Walter Eucken 1891 German economist
- Kai Hansen 1963 German guitarist and singer
- Ádám Lang 1993 Hungarian association football player
- Bindu 1951 Indian actress
- Svetlana Masterkova 1968 Russian middle-distance runner
- Wilhelm Kienzl 1857 Austrian composer
- Robin Roefs 2003 Dutch association football player
- Sylvie Testud 1971 French actress
- D. R. Kaprekar 1905 Indian mathematician
- Paul Young 1956 English musician
- Alexander Meier 1983 German footballer
- Esteban Chaves 1990 Road racing cyclist
- Freddy Rodriguez 1975 American actor
- Elisabeth Hevelius 1647 Astronomer
- Jacques Plante 1929 Canadian ice hockey player
- Gyude Bryant 1949 Liberian politician
- Natalia Kaczmarek 1998 Polish athlete
- D.J. Caruso 1965 American film and television director
- Princess Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma 1870 Bulgarian and Parmese Royal
- Mathilde Seigner 1968 French actress
- Jeff Reine-Adélaïde 1998 French footballer
- Dmitri Kirichenko 1977 Russian footballer
- Filip Hološko 1984 Slovak footballer
- Amanda Ilestedt 1993 Swedish association football player
Names link to each person's Wikidata entry, the source of the date. Data: Wikidata (CC0), refreshed October 30, 2026. People born on January 17 share the 17th of January as a birthday; check the Famous Birthdays Finder for any other date.