February 11 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on February 11

• Thomas Edison (1847)

  American inventor holding over 1,000 patents, including major contributions to the practical incandescent light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera.

• Burt Reynolds (1936)

  American actor known for Smokey and the Bandit and Boogie Nights, one of the top box-office draws of the 1970s.

• Sheryl Crow (1962)

  American singer-songwriter known for hits including 'All I Wanna Do' and 'If It Makes You Happy.'

• Jennifer Aniston (1969)

  American actress best known for her role as Rachel Green on the television series Friends.

• Taylor Lautner (1992)

  American actor known for playing Jacob Black in The Twilight Saga film series.

This Day in History

• 1858 — Fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous reported the first of several Marian apparitions at Lourdes, France, which grew into one of the most visited Catholic pilgrimage sites in the world.

• 1929 — The Lateran Treaty was signed between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy, formally establishing Vatican City as an independent sovereign state.

• 1979 — The Iranian Revolution succeeded as the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi collapsed, paving the way for the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

• 1990 — Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years, a defining moment in the eventual end of apartheid in South Africa.

What February 11 Says About You

Thomas Edison, born on this date in 1847, held more than a thousand patents by the end of his life, a body of practical invention broad enough to include the light bulb, the phonograph, and early motion picture technology under one working lifetime. That same instinct toward building lasting new structures — institutional rather than mechanical — turns up repeatedly elsewhere in this date's real history. The Lateran Treaty, signed on this exact date in 1929, created Vatican City as its own sovereign state, a genuinely novel political arrangement that resolved a decades-long dispute between the Holy See and the Italian government. Nelson Mandela's release from prison on this date in 1990, after 27 years of incarceration, marked the true beginning of the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, a transformation that took years more to complete but that visibly started on this specific day, with Mandela walking free in front of a global television audience. Aquarius governs this date, and its numerology carries the master number 11, read in that tradition as heightened intuition and idealism, giving February 11 an unusually strong claim to being a birthday about turning a long-held vision into something concretely real, whether that means a working light bulb, a newly sovereign city-state, or the end of a system of legal racial segregation. The Iranian Revolution's success on this date in 1979 similarly marked a decisive collapse of an old order and the emergence of an entirely new political structure, one whose consequences are still felt in the region today. Bernadette Soubirous's first reported apparition at Lourdes in 1858 began an entirely different kind of lasting transformation, turning a small French town into one of the most visited religious pilgrimage sites in the world, a shift set in motion by the report of a single fourteen-year-old girl. Jennifer Aniston, Sheryl Crow, and Burt Reynolds round out the date's entertainment history, each achieving a level of career-defining recognition tied closely to a single, hugely visible role or run of hits. The month's amethyst and its violet-and-primrose flowers cap off a birthday defined, again and again, by moments when something long-building finally, visibly changed. Jennifer Aniston won a Primetime Emmy Award for her performance on Friends in 2002, one of the show's final major honors before its run ended three years later. Sheryl Crow, born the same date in 1962, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 and has since become a vocal advocate for early detection and regular screening. Burt Reynolds topped the annual list of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws for five consecutive years in the late 1970s, a run unmatched by almost any other leading man of that decade.