December 31 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on December 31

• Henri Matisse (1869)

  French artist known for bold use of color and, alongside Picasso, one of the defining figures of early 20th-century modern art.

• Anthony Hopkins (1937)

  Welsh actor and Academy Award winner known for The Silence of the Lambs.

• Val Kilmer (1959)

  American actor known for Top Gun and Batman Forever.

This Day in History

• 1999 — Russian President Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on national television, naming Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting president.

• 1999 — The United States formally transferred control of the Panama Canal to Panama, ending nearly a century of American administration of the waterway.

What December 31 Says About You

A December 31 birthday shares its date with the one night of the year built entirely around endings and beginnings happening simultaneously, which makes for a genuinely fitting, if occasionally overshadowed, birthday to have. The date's real history includes one of the more consequential handoffs of power in modern memory: on December 31, 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin appeared on national television and unexpectedly announced his resignation, asking the Russian people for forgiveness for the hardships of the 1990s before naming Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting president effective immediately — a broadcast recorded only hours before it aired, handing Putin control of Russia's nuclear codes and government machinery with almost no formal transition period, an abruptness that startled even senior Russian officials at the time. On the very same date, the United States formally transferred control of the Panama Canal to Panama, ending nearly a century of American administration of the waterway under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties negotiated two decades earlier in 1977, agreements sharply contested in the U.S. Senate at the time and still, for some American commentators, a point of political controversy today. Capricorn, presiding over the calendar's final day, is associated with the disciplined handling of transitions and legacies. Henri Matisse, born on this date in 1869, spent a long career continually reinventing his own visual language, moving from representational painting into the boldly simplified cut-paper works of his final years, created largely from a wheelchair or bed after surgery left him unable to stand at an easel for long stretches — work now regarded by many art historians as equal in importance to his earlier painted output rather than a diminished coda to it. Anthony Hopkins, born in 1937, built a screen career defined by transformation between roles so complete that audiences often struggled to reconcile his most menacing performances with his gentler ones. Val Kilmer, born in 1959, moved between blockbuster leading roles and more idiosyncratic character work across a career later shaped by his own serious health challenges. The 31st reduces to numerology day number 4, tied to structure and the disciplined completion of long-term work, a fitting number for the calendar's final day, when one year's structure formally gives way to the next. Closure and renewal at once describe the old associations tied to turquoise, blue topaz, zircon, and tanzanite, an appropriate note to end the year, and this survey of December, on. Yeltsin's resignation speech was pre-recorded hours before its broadcast and kept secret from all but a handful of senior officials, meaning most of the Russian government learned of the transition at the same moment as the public did. Ratifying the Torrijos-Carter Treaties had been genuinely contentious in the Senate two decades earlier, with opponents warning that giving up the canal would damage American strategic interests, yet the actual 1999 handover ceremony in Panama City passed with comparatively little controversy, a quiet anticlimax after years of heated debate. Matisse himself described the cut-paper technique not as a lesser substitute for painting but as, in his own words, drawing directly with color, a distinction he insisted on as reviewers of the era were still inclined to treat the Jazz series as a curiosity from an artist past his prime.