August 17 birthdays, facts & history
Everything about being born on August 17, from your sign and birth stone to who shares your birthday.
Zodiac sign
♌︎ Leo
Jul 23 – Aug 22
Birth stone
Peridot
Birth flower
Gladiolus
How common
#79 of 366
by US birth counts
Famous August 17 birthdays
Samuel Goldwyn · Polish-American film producer1882
Charles I of Austria · Last monarch of Austria-Hungary1887
Mae West · American actress, singer, screenwriter, and writer1893
Mikhail Botvinnik · Soviet chess player1911
Maureen O'Hara · Irish–American actress and singer1920
Jiang Zemin · Former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party1926
Francis Gary Powers · American pilot shot down flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union1929
V. S. Naipaul · Trinidadian-British writer1932
Margaret Hamilton · American NASA scientist and mathematician1936
Robert De Niro · American actor1943
Larry Ellison · American internet entrepreneur and businessman1944
Herta Müller · German-Romanian novelist, poet and essayist1953
Belinda Carlisle · American singer1958
Jonathan Franzen · American writer1959
Sean Penn · American actor1960
Jim Courier · American tennis player1970
Thierry Henry · French association football player and manager1977
Austin Butler · American actor1991
Taissa Farmiga · American actress1994
Lil Pump · American rapper2000
On this day in history
1907Pike Place Market, one of the oldest continuously operated public farmers' markets in the U.S. and a popular tourist attraction, opened in Seattle, Washington.
1953First meeting of Narcotics Anonymous takes place, in Southern California.
1959American musician Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, which became one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed jazz recordings of all time.
2008Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal of the Summer Olympics in Beijing, setting the record for the most gold medals won by an athlete at a single games.
1915A category 4 hurricane made landfall in Galveston, Texas, leaving at least 275 people dead.
1942World War II: U.S. Marines raid the Japanese-held Pacific island of Makin.
1943Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt met in a secret conference in Quebec.
1945Animal Farm, George Orwell's satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism, was first published.
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