June 27 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on June 27

• Helen Keller (1880)

  American author, disability rights advocate, and the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

• Tobey Maguire (1975)

  American actor known for playing Spider-Man in Sam Raimi's original film trilogy.

• H. Ross Perot (1930)

  American businessman and independent presidential candidate who won nearly 19 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 U.S. election.

• J. Paul Getty (1892)

  American oil industrialist and one of the wealthiest people in the world during his lifetime, founder of the Getty Museum.

• Isabelle Adjani (1955)

  French actress known for The Story of Adele H. and Camille Claudel.

• Vera Wang (1949)

  American fashion designer known for bridal wear and a long-running eponymous label.

This Day in History

• 1950 — President Harry Truman ordered U.S. air and naval forces to support South Korea, formally committing American military power to the Korean War.

• 1954 — A CIA-backed coup overthrew democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, installing a military government and beginning decades of political instability in the country.

• 1991 — The Ten-Day War began between Slovenia and the Yugoslav People's Army following Slovenia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia.

• 1844 — Mormon leader Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob while jailed in Carthage, Illinois.

What June 27 Says About You

Helen Keller, born June 27, 1880, spent her life proving that a body's limitations don't have to define the scope of a mind, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor's degree and going on to author a dozen books and lecture internationally on disability rights, labor issues, and women's suffrage. It's a birthday defined by breaking presumed limits, which makes an odd but real contrast with two of the date's other historical entries, both about limits being violently imposed rather than overcome. Truman's decision on this date in 1950 to commit U.S. air and naval forces to defend South Korea drew a hard limit on how far Cold War-era communist expansion would be tolerated by American policy, a line that held militarily but at enormous human cost over the following three years. The CIA-backed 1954 coup against Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, also carried out on this date, imposed a very different and far less defensible kind of limit — removing a government through covert force largely to protect United Fruit Company's land holdings, an intervention historians widely regard as having destabilized Guatemalan politics for decades afterward. Tobey Maguire, born June 27, 1975, spent his most famous role playing a character defined by exactly the tension this date keeps returning to: extraordinary power constrained by the deliberate choice to use it responsibly. J. Paul Getty, born on this date in 1892, accumulated one of the largest personal fortunes in the world during his lifetime, a very different kind of limit-testing built around how much wealth one individual could amass. Numerology reduces the 27th to day number 9, tied to completion and idealism — genuinely fitting for Helen Keller's own life, which by any measure completed far more than her early circumstances suggested was possible. Pearl and rose remain June's steady undercurrent, but June 27's real character is built on the tension between limits overcome and limits imposed, sometimes both within the same historical hour. Vera Wang, born on this date in 1949, faced her own early limit when she failed to make the 1968 U.S. Olympic figure skating team, a setback she has said redirected her toward fashion design, where she eventually built one of the most recognized bridal-wear labels in the world — a career built, in its own way, on turning one closed door into a considerably larger one, decades before her label became a fixture of red carpets and royal weddings alike.