March 19 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on March 19

• Wyatt Earp (1848)

  American lawman and gambler best known for his involvement in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

• Ursula Andress (1936)

  Swiss actress known for playing the original 'Bond girl,' Honey Ryder, in the 1962 film Dr. No.

• Glenn Close (1947)

  American actress known for Fatal Attraction and the eight Academy Award nominations she has received across her career.

• Bruce Willis (1955)

  American actor known for the Die Hard film series and Pulp Fiction.

This Day in History

• 1918 — The U.S. Congress passed the Standard Time Act, formally establishing time zones across the country and instituting the first federally mandated daylight saving time.

• 1931 — Nevada legalized casino gambling, a decision that would eventually make Las Vegas the state's economic center.

• 2003 — The United States, joined by coalition allies, began the invasion of Iraq, opening the Iraq War.

• 1932 — The Sydney Harbour Bridge officially opened in Australia after eight years of construction.

What March 19 Says About You

March 19 has a way of formalizing things that were previously loose or informal, for better and for worse. The Standard Time Act, passed on this date in 1918, took what had been a patchwork of local solar times across the United States and imposed a single, federally coordinated system of time zones, along with the country's first mandated daylight saving time — an entirely artificial structure imposed on something as basic as what hour it is. Nevada's 1931 legalization of casino gambling, on the same date, formalized an activity that had already been happening informally across the state for decades, simply making official what was already common practice. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, beginning on this date, was itself the formal opening of a military campaign that had been building diplomatically and militarily for months beforehand. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened on this date in 1932 after eight years of construction, was its own act of formalizing a connection — linking Sydney's two shores with a single continuous structure after decades of ferries and informal crossings. The date also carries an older, unofficial fixture: March 19 is traditionally observed in Catholic and other Christian calendars as the Feast of Saint Joseph, one of the longer-standing entries on a liturgical calendar built entirely around formalized, repeating observance, even without a single founding year attached to it. Wyatt Earp, born March 19, 1848, spent much of his life in a West that was itself in the process of turning informal frontier justice into something more like formal law — not always successfully, and not always on the right side of that transition, but very much a man of exactly this date's theme. It's a fitting birthday for the last day of Pisces before the sign turns over to Aries, a genuine threshold in the zodiac calendar even though March 19 itself sits comfortably inside Pisces' standard range rather than on the cusp. The numerology reinforces the sense of an ending about to turn into a beginning: the 19th reduces to day number 1, tied to independence and new starts, the same digit that opens the whole numerological cycle over again. Glenn Close, born the same day in 1947, has spent a career playing characters right at the edge of transformation, control slipping into something else entirely. Still claimed by aquamarine, bloodstone, daffodil, and jonquil for one more day, this is a birthday that sits at the very last edge of one season's zodiac sign, about to formalize into the next. Ursula Andress, also born on this date, in 1936, played the first Bond girl in the franchise's first film, formally establishing an archetype the series would return to for six decades afterward. Bruce Willis, born the same day in 1955, helped formalize an entire template for the modern American action hero, a persona built on wisecracking under pressure that later films across the genre continued to imitate directly.