21 October: today's birthdays

• Liliane Bettencourt - French businesswoman, born Liliane Henriette Charlotte Schueller. In 1957 she inherited from his father the  French company L'Oréal
• Leo Burnett - American advertising executive
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - English poet, philosopher, and literary critic. He wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Alphonse de Lamartine - French poet, novelist, playwright, historian, and politician. He wrote the novel Graziella, which was adapted into the homonymous film in 1955
• Georg Dollmann - German architect
• Claude Fauriel - French critic, philologist and historian
  
• Carrie Fisher - American actress and writer, born Carrie Frances Fisher. She was the daughter of actress and singer Debbie Reynolds. She was best known for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars film series
• Dizzy Gillespie - American jazz musician, trumpeter, singer, and composer, born John Birks Gillespie
• Ursula Kroeber Le Guin - American writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and children's books. He wrote  The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia 
• Gyula Krúdy - Hungarian writer and journalist. He wrote The Adventures of Sinbad and Sunflower
• Nikita Sergeevič Michalkov (Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov) - Russian film director and actor. He won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1995, directing Burnt by the Sun 2
• Benjamin Netanyahu - Israeli politician, Prime Minister of Israel since 2009.
• Alfred Nobel - Swedish scientist and engineer, inventor of dynamite and creator of the Nobel Prizes in 1895
• Robert Plutchik - American psychologist
• Edna Purviance - American actress, a star of the silent film era. She was into a relationship with Charlie Chaplin
• Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy - French politician, archaeologist, architectural theorist and art critic
• Jean-Pierre Sauvage - French chemist and laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Bernard Feringa and James Fraser Stoddart
• John Strachey - English politician and writer, born Evelyn John St Loe Strachey. He wrote Labour's task and The pursuit of peace