December 21 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on December 21

• Jane Fonda (1937)

  American actress and activist, two-time Academy Award winner known for Klute and Coming Home.

• Samuel L. Jackson (1948)

  American actor known for Pulp Fiction and one of the highest-grossing actors in box office history across his full filmography.

• Kiefer Sutherland (1966)

  Canadian-American actor known for the television series 24.

This Day in History

• 1913 — The first modern crossword puzzle, created by Arthur Wynne, was published in the New York World newspaper.

• 1968 — Apollo 8 launched, becoming the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and travel to the Moon, though it did not land.

• 1988 — Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, after a terrorist bomb detonated on board, killing all 259 people on the plane and 11 people on the ground.

What December 21 Says About You

December 21 is the most astronomically unsettled birthday on the entire calendar, sitting on the cusp between Sagittarius and Capricorn and, depending on the year, on the winter solstice itself, the shortest day and longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. That instability makes it a fitting date for three of the era's more restless careers. Jane Fonda, born in 1937, moved between Hollywood stardom, prominent and controversial anti-Vietnam War activism, a fitness-video empire, and a return to serious acting well into her 80s, rarely settling into one identity for long. Samuel L. Jackson, born in 1948, built the single highest-grossing filmography of any actor when his work is totaled across his full career, a body of work spanning blaxploitation-adjacent early roles, prestige drama, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kiefer Sutherland, born in 1966, became most closely associated with a single sustained role, counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer on 24, a series whose real-time format was itself a genuine structural experiment for network television when it debuted in 2001. The date's real history includes several genuine firsts and one of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the late Cold War. Arthur Wynne's first modern crossword puzzle appeared in the New York World on December 21, 1913, a newspaper puzzle feature nobody involved expected to become a permanent global fixture of print media. Apollo 8 launched on this date in 1968, sending the first crewed spacecraft beyond low Earth orbit and around the Moon, its crew delivering a Christmas Eve broadcast and photograph, Earthrise, that reshaped how many people understood the planet's fragility. Twenty years later, in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in an attack that led to one of the longest and most complex criminal investigations in aviation history. Numerology reduces the 21st to day number 3, tied to expression and adaptability, a fitting number for a birthday that, astrologically and astronomically both, refuses to sit still in one fixed place on the calendar. Transition is the plainest theme running through this date, whether in a crossword's blank grid waiting to be filled, a spacecraft leaving Earth's orbit for the first time, or the sun reaching its lowest point of the year before beginning its slow return. December's birthstones and its two flowers, narcissus and holly, are traditionally tied to renewal, a theme suited to a date positioned exactly at the calendar's own turning point, though it sits considerably less easily beside 1988's tragedy, a reminder that no single date's folklore accounts for everything real history attaches to it.