April 20 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on April 20

• Ryan O'Neal (1941)

  American actor known for Love Story and Barry Lyndon.

• Jessica Lange (1949)

  American actress and two-time Academy Award winner known for films including Tootsie and Blue Sky.

• Luther Vandross (1951)

  American R&B singer known for a run of hit ballads and for his work as a session and background vocalist earlier in his career.

• Miranda Kerr (1983)

  Australian model known for her work with Victoria's Secret.

This Day in History

• 1902 — Physicists Pierre and Marie Curie successfully isolated radium chloride, a step that helped confirm the existence of the element radium.

• 1999 — Two students carried out a mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives.

• 2010 — An explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and triggered the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history.

What April 20 Says About You

April 20 opens Taurus, the fixed earth sign that follows Aries on the zodiac calendar, and the shift shows up clearly across this date's real history — less about sudden ignition, more about sustained, often difficult, follow-through. Pierre and Marie Curie's isolation of radium chloride on April 20, 1902, wasn't a single dramatic breakthrough so much as the product of years of grinding, physically dangerous work processing tons of pitchblende ore by hand in a converted shed, exactly the kind of patient, earth-sign persistence Taurus is traditionally associated with. That same steadiness shows up, in a very different field, in Jessica Lange's career: born on this date in 1949, she built a body of work spanning five decades and two competitive and non-competitive Oscar wins, without ever settling into a single repeated persona. Luther Vandross, born in 1951, spent years as a background and session vocalist — including work with David Bowie and Chaka Khan — before establishing his own solo career, a slow build that eventually made him one of the most technically respected R&B vocalists of his generation. Ryan O'Neal, born in 1941, became a defining romantic lead of early-1970s American film, most famously in Love Story. This date also carries two of the heaviest modern tragedies on the American calendar: on April 20, 1999, two students carried out the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 students and a teacher, an event that reshaped national conversations about school safety for decades afterward. And on April 20, 2010, an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and triggered the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history, a disaster whose environmental consequences played out over months, in keeping with Taurus's association with the earth itself. The Columbine attackers reportedly chose the date deliberately, tied to Adolf Hitler's April 20, 1889 birthday, a detail investigators have long noted about the planning. The Curies also isolated a second element in that same stretch of research, naming it polonium after Marie Curie's native Poland, a small act of patriotic tribute embedded permanently in the periodic table. April's shared birthstone, the diamond — geologically speaking, itself a product of sustained pressure over enormous timescales — pairs naturally with Taurus's patient, grounded temperament in a way that felt slightly forced for the faster-moving Aries dates earlier in the month. Reduce the day-of-month digits and this date lands on 2, a number traditionally tied to partnership and diplomacy, a fitting number for the Curies' collaborative scientific partnership specifically. April's birth flowers, the daisy and sweet pea, close a date whose real history runs from patient scientific triumph to two of the starkest tragedies of the modern American era.