January 10 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on January 10

• Rod Stewart (1945)

  British rock and pop singer known for hits like Maggie May and a career spanning rock, folk, and standards.

• George Foreman (1949)

  American heavyweight boxing champion and later successful entrepreneur, known for reclaiming the world title at age 45.

• Pat Benatar (1953)

  American rock singer known for hits including Hit Me with Your Best Shot and Love Is a Battlefield.

• Sherman Alexie (1966)

  American author and filmmaker known for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Smoke Signals.

• Jim Carrey (1962)

  Canadian-American actor and comedian known for Ace Ventura, The Truman Show, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

• Sal Mineo (1939)

  American actor known for his Academy Award-nominated role opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

This Day in History

• 1776 — Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense, arguing forcefully for American independence from Britain and selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

• 1863 — The London Underground, the world's first underground passenger railway, opened between Paddington and Farringdon.

• 1920 — The Treaty of Versailles took effect and the League of Nations formally came into existence, marking the official end of World War I.

• 1946 — The first General Assembly of the United Nations convened in London.

What January 10 Says About You

George Foreman, born January 10, 1949, built one of the more improbable second acts in sports history when he reclaimed the heavyweight title at 45, a comeback that fits neatly alongside a date whose real history is full of institutions and ideas starting over or finally getting off the ground. The London Underground opened on this date in 1863 as the world's first underground railway, an infrastructure leap that reshaped how a city moved. Eighty-three years later, on the same January 10, the first General Assembly of the United Nations convened in London, a different kind of infrastructure project entirely, aimed at reshaping how nations dealt with each other after a catastrophic war. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published on this date in 1776, argued that the old arrangement between the colonies and Britain simply had to end, a pamphlet whose blunt persuasive force helped tip American opinion toward independence. Jim Carrey and Rod Stewart, both born January 10 decades apart, made careers out of a kind of theatrical reinvention of themselves in public, an echo, however loose, of a date that keeps marking moments when an old system gave way to a new one. The Treaty of Versailles taking legal effect on this date in 1920, alongside the League of Nations formally coming into existence, added a further, heavier example: an attempt, however imperfect in hindsight, to build a genuinely new framework for international relations out of the wreckage of the First World War. Capricorn's practical, structure-minded influence sits alongside a numerology reading of 1 for the 10th, a digit sum still tied to initiative and fresh starts even landing on the tenth rather than the first of the month, and a January 10 birthday keeps company with a genuinely dense cluster of firsts: first underground railway, first postwar peace treaty taking effect, first UN assembly. Its real company runs from boxing rings to pamphlets to subway tunnels, all sharing a common thread of things finally, formally beginning, well beyond whatever garnet and the carnation might otherwise suggest. Sal Mineo, born on this date in 1939, had his own breakthrough moment early, earning an Academy Award nomination as a teenager for Rebel Without a Cause, a role that captured a very specific late-1950s restlessness just as clearly as the era's bigger institutional shifts captured a restlessness of their own. Pat Benatar, also born on this date in 1953, brought a similarly forceful, unapologetic presence to early-1980s rock radio at a time when few women were fronted as hard-edged rock acts, another small but real instance of this birthday's residents pushing into spaces that hadn't quite made room for them yet.