1. Tom Cruise is an American actor and film
producer. He was ranked the world’s most powerful
celebrity in 2006 by Forbes magazine. Tom has been
nominated for three Academy Awards and won
three Golden Globe Awards.
In 2005, Economist Edward Jay Epstein argued that
Tom Cruise is one of the few producers who are able
to guarantee the success of a billion-dollar movie
franchise. Since 2005, Tom Cruise and Paula
Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists
Film Studio, with Tom Cruise as producer and star.
Steven Paul Jobs is an American businessman and
co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Jobs
is the former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios.
2. Cherilyn Sarkisian, better known as Cher, is
an American pop singer-songwriter, actor,
director and record producer. She has won
an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, an
Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards
and a People’s Choice Award for her work
in film, music and television.
Walter Elias Disney was a
multiple Academy Award-winning
American film producer, director,
screenwriter, voice actor, animator,
entrepreneur and philanthropist. As
the co-founder of Walt Disney
Productions, Disney became one of
the best-known motion picture
producers in the world.
Disney received fifty-nine
Academy Award nominations and
won twenty-six Oscars, including a
record four in one year. He also
won seven Emmy Awards.
3. Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor
and businessman who developed many devices
that greatly influenced life around the world,
including the phonograph and the long-lasting,
practical electric light bulb.
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter,
draughtsman, and sculptor. He is one of
the most recognised figures in 20th-
century art. Pablo Picasso is best known
for co-founding the Cubist movement and
for the wide variety of styles embodied in
his work.
4. Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author and
poet, most famously known for his fairy tales.
Among his best-known stories are “The Little
Mermaid”, “Thumbelina”, “The Little Match Girl”,
“The Ugly Ducking” and “The Snow Queen”. His
fairy tales have been translated into over 150
languages and continue to be published in millions of
copies all over the world and inspired many other
works.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better
known by the pen name Lewis Carroll,
was an English author, mathematician,
logician, Anglican deacon and
photographer. His famous writings are
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and
its sequel Through the Looking-Glass.
5. Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian
polymath, being a scientist, mathematician,
engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter,
sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and
writer. Leonardo has often been described
as the archetype of the renaissance man, a
man whose unquenchable curiosity was
equalled only by his powers of invention.
He is widely considered to be one of the
greatest painters of all time and perhaps the
most diversely talented person ever to have
lived.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as
a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa
and The Last Supper, are the most famous,
most reproduced and most parodied portrait
and religious painting of all time,
respectively, their fame approached only by
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.
Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man
is also regarded as a cultural icon.
Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson is
an English industrialist, best known for his
Virgin brand of over 360 companies, e.g.
Virgin Atlantic Airways and Virgin
Records. Richard Branson is the 236th
richest person according to Forbes’ 2008
list of billionaires.
6. Scott Raymond Adams is the creator of the
Dilbert comic strip and the author of several
business commentaries, social satires and
experimental philosophy books.
Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent
Scottish born scientist, inventor and
innovator who is credited with inventing
the first practical telephone. In retrospect,
Bell considered his most famous invention
an intrusion on his real work as a scientist
and refused to have a telephone in his
study.
7. Henry Ford was the American founder of
the Ford Motor Company and father of
modern assembly lines used in mass
production. His introduction of the Model T
automobile revolutionised transportation and
American industry. He was a prolific
inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents.
As owner of the Ford Company, he became
one of the richest and best-known people in
the world.
Ford is credited with “Fordism”, that is, the
mass production of large numbers of
inexpensive automobiles using the assembly
line, coupled with high wages for his
workers. Ford had a global vision, with
consumerism as the key to peace.
Henry Ford’s intense commitment to
lowering costs resulted in many technical
and business innovations including a
franchise system that put a dealership in every city in North America, and in major cities
on six continents.
Whoopi Goldberg is an African American actress,
comedian, singer-songwriter and media personality.
She is one of only a handful who have won
Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.
8. John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy
was the 35th President of the United
States. He was the second-youngest
President and the youngest elected
to the office, at the age of 43.
Kennedy is also the only president
to have won a Pulitzer Prize.
Steven Spielberg is an American film director,
screenwriter and film producer. In 2006, the
magazine Premiere listed him as the most
powerful and influential figure in the motion
picture industry. Time listed him as one of the 100
Most Important People of the Century. At the end
of the twentieth century, Life named him the most
influential person of his generation.
9. George Washington was the leader of the
Continental Army in the American Revolutionary
War and served as the first President of the United
States of America.
Washington is seen as a symbol of the United States
and republicanism in practice. His devotion to civic
virtue made him an exemplary figure among early
American politicians. Washington was awarded the
very first Congressional Gold Medal with the Thanks
of Congress.
Washington has been consistently ranked by scholars
as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents.
Thomas John Watson, Jr. was the president
of IBM and the eldest son of Thomas J.
Watson, IBM’s first president. He was listed
as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most
influential people of the 20th century.
10. Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Bloom is a
classically trained English actor. He had his break-
through roles in 2001 as the elf-prince Legolas in
The Lord of the Rings and blacksmith Will Turner
in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy of films,
and subsequently established himself as a lead in
Hollywood films.
Keanu Charles Reeves is a Canadian-
American actor best known for his
portrayals of Neo in the action film trilogy
The Matrix, Kevin Lomax in the
supernatural thriller The Devil’s Advocate,
and his role in Constantine.