March 17 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on March 17

• Nat 'King' Cole (1919)

  American singer and pianist known for 'Unforgettable' and one of the first Black entertainers to host his own American television series.

• Patrick Duffy (1949)

  American actor known for playing Bobby Ewing on the television series Dallas.

• Kurt Russell (1951)

  American actor known for Escape from New York and Tombstone.

• Rob Lowe (1964)

  American actor known for The West Wing and St. Elmo's Fire.

• Mia Hamm (1972)

  American soccer player and two-time Olympic gold medalist, widely regarded as one of the best players in the sport's history.

This Day in History

• 461 — The traditional date of the death of Saint Patrick, the missionary credited with spreading Christianity in Ireland, whose feast day became the basis for St. Patrick's Day.

• 1776 — British forces evacuated Boston during the American Revolutionary War after colonial troops fortified Dorchester Heights, a date still marked locally as Evacuation Day.

• 1969 — Golda Meir was sworn in as the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, becoming the country's first and, to date, only female head of government.

• 1992 — White South African voters approved a referendum authorizing the government to negotiate an end to apartheid, clearing the way for the country's first multiracial elections two years later.

What March 17 Says About You

March 17 is claimed almost entirely by a single association — St. Patrick's Day — but the date's real, documented history is broader and more interesting than the parades suggest. The observance traces to the traditional death date of Saint Patrick in the year 461, a missionary whose actual historical record is thin enough that much of his biography comes down to tradition rather than verified fact, a genuinely honest caveat worth stating rather than glossing over. What's better documented is what the date has since accumulated: the British evacuation of Boston in 1776, still marked locally as Evacuation Day, came after colonial forces fortified Dorchester Heights and made the city untenable for occupying troops almost overnight. Golda Meir's swearing-in as Israel's prime minister on this date in 1969 marked a genuine political first that, more than five decades later, has still not been repeated in that country. South Africa's 1992 referendum, in which the white electorate voted to authorize negotiations ending apartheid, was a deliberately narrow vote with enormous consequences, opening the door to the country's first fully democratic elections two years later. There's a real thread of transition running through the date — one occupying force leaving a city, one country's political ceiling being tested for the first time, one nation's entire electoral system about to be rebuilt from the ground up. It suits Pisces' comfort with liminal, in-between states, the sign that's often most itself right at a threshold rather than settled on either side of it. Add the digits of the 17th together and you land on 8, numerology's number for ambition and hard-won achievement, an undertone worth noting given how often this date's real history has turned on power changing hands. Nat King Cole, born March 17, 1919, broke his own kind of threshold as one of the first Black entertainers to host a network television program in the United States, doing so against real and well-documented resistance from sponsors. Mia Hamm, born the same day in 1972, helped establish women's soccer as a major American sport in an era when that wasn't a given either. Neither aquamarine nor bloodstone, nor daffodil nor jonquil, has anything to do with shamrocks — a small reminder that this is a birthday whose real story is much less about the parade than about people who moved a threshold and made it stick. Kurt Russell and Rob Lowe, both also born March 17, spent careers moving fluidly between genres — action, drama, comedy — rather than settling permanently on one side of any single professional threshold, a smaller echo of the date's larger pattern. Patrick Duffy's role on Dallas involved its own famous threshold-crossing: his character's death and subsequent, much-mocked 'it was all a dream' return remains one of television's most discussed reversals of a supposedly permanent ending.