With three generations of the family gathered around the table to celebrate four January birthdays, we enjoyed a favourite holiday pastime: checking our 2024 horoscopes and boasting (or protesting) about which famous people shared our birth dates.
It’s nice to google your wife’s and daughter’s joint July 25 birthday (Leo’s traits: “Warm, lovable, with an intense air of royalty about them”), then casually mention their shared birthday with Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and started World War I.
It’s fun to mention their anniversary closeness to Arthur Lubin, the brains behind the Francis the Talking Mule films, as well as the Mr Ed TV series, about a talking horse. Mr Lubin’s creativity was focused on garrulous equines. If he’d lived longer than his 96 years maybe we’d have been subjected to a loquacious donkey and a chatty zebra. By now they’re frantically googling in self-defence. “We also share a birthday with Elias Canetti, the Nobel Prize-winning author,” my wife adds. Too late. My trump card: “What about your birthday mate Anatoly Onoprienko, known as the Beast of Belarus, who killed 52 people?”
Time to check what 2024 held for local luminaries who shared birthdays with historical figures. For example, the birth-mates of Anthony Albanese (a March 2 Pisces: “Stay true to yourself and you’ll make it out the other side far wiser”) range imaginatively from Dr Seuss, of Cat-In-The-Hat children’s books, to James Bond’s Daniel Craig, from Rebel Wilson to Lou Reed and from Jon Bon Jovi to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Peter Dutton (a November 18 Scorpio), no less creatively, shares birth dates with W.S. Gilbert of the comic-opera duo, Margaret Atwood, poll pioneer George Gallup and Johnny Mercer, who wrote Moon River. Oh, and Mickey Mouse.
Dutton’s horoscope: “With a Sun-Mars alignment in your Solar Return you’re bolder, more assertive and energetic. Try a more sensitive persona to attract pleasantly unusual circumstances and people into your life.”
Roger Cook (Leo, August 20): “While you encounter resistance from others, your path is to push forward and uncover new ways of expressing yourself.” Would hints from the lives of his birthday mates Josef Strauss, Isaac Hayes, Rajiv Gandhi and Slobodan Milosevic help?
Perhaps surprisingly, Basil Zempilas (Leo, July 30) shares a horoscope with the Premier, as well as a birth date with the ultra-successful Henry Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger. And also with Australia’s most unsuccessful Test cricketer, Roy Park. In Park’s debut against England at the MCG he made a first-ball duck in his only innings. Legend has it his wife, watching in the stands, dropped a stitch in her knitting as he prepared to face his first ball, bent down to retrieve it at the moment of delivery, and missed his entire Test career.
For Sam Kerr (Virgo, September 10, birthday-mates Arnold Palmer, Margaret Trudeau and Colin Firth) the stars say, “You’re determined, hard-working and a true individualist. Although reserved, your personality is big. You’re intense, love life, and possess much determination and ambition. Still, you always seem to have your feet on the ground.”
Of course, it’s Capricorns (for example, Elvis Presley, Marlene Dietrich and Muhammad Ali) who are famed for their charisma. Indeed, for typical Capricorn magnetism who could beat Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un? (Unlucky Sagittarian Joseph Stalin — born on December 18 — just missed our star sign by a whisker.) The most famous Capricorn of all, Jesus, shared his birthday with Humphrey Bogart, Sissy Spacek and Annie Lennox. And you learn of historic notables who shared the exact day and year, such as Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, February 12, 1809.
The year 1860 was also pivotal for both men: Lincoln was elected president and saw the southern States start leaving the union, while the impact of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species spread worldwide.
Perhaps astrologers could explain The Birthday Effect: a statistical phenomenon that suggests the likelihood of dying increases on your birthday. One Swiss study puts your chances of leaving this world on the same date you entered it as 14 per cent higher.
William Shakespeare, born on April 23, 1564, and died, cause unknown, on that date in 1616, aged 52. A friend surmised: “Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard.”
For a neat departure, however, you can’t beat the full life of my favourite Capricorn, Walter Diemer, who invented bubblegum. On his 93rd birthday, on January 8, 1998, Walter finally went pop.