March 21 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on March 21

• Johann Sebastian Bach (1685)

  German Baroque composer known for the Brandenburg Concertos, the Mass in B Minor, and a vast body of sacred and instrumental music.

• Matthew Broderick (1962)

  American actor known for Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the voice of adult Simba in The Lion King.

• Rosie O'Donnell (1962)

  American comedian, actress, and television host.

• Gary Oldman (1958)

  English actor and Academy Award winner for Darkest Hour.

This Day in History

• 1963 — Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay officially closed after 29 years of operation as a maximum-security federal prison.

• 1965 — Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands of demonstrators on the successful third attempt at the Selma-to-Montgomery march, protected by federalized National Guard troops after two earlier attempts had been blocked or attacked.

• 1990 — Namibia formally gained independence from South Africa, becoming the last African country to achieve independence from colonial or minority rule.

What March 21 Says About You

March 21 opens Aries, and the date's real history reads like a study in what it actually takes to finally break through after being blocked. The Selma-to-Montgomery march that succeeded on this date in 1965 was the third attempt in a matter of weeks — the first had ended in the violence of 'Bloody Sunday,' the second turned back voluntarily under a federal court order — before this third march, finally protected by federalized National Guard troops, walked the full 54 miles to Montgomery. Namibia's independence, achieved on this same date in 1990, came after more than a century of colonial rule and a drawn-out international legal fight at the United Nations before the country finally became sovereign. Even Alcatraz's closure on this date in 1963 marked the end of a notoriously difficult-to-escape institution, shut down not by force but by the plain economic reality that the isolated island fortress had simply become too expensive to keep running. That persistence-rewarded theme fits Aries well — the sign that leads the zodiac year specifically because it's associated with the raw will to push through resistance rather than wait it out. Johann Sebastian Bach, born March 21, 1685, worked for most of his career inside rigid institutional constraints, composing on strict deadlines for church services nearly every week of his working life, and produced some of the most enduring music in Western history anyway, discipline turned into breakthrough rather than limitation. Add 2 and 1 and you land on 3, numerology's digit for creative expression — a fitting undertone for a date whose real history involves people finding a way through when the direct path was blocked. Gary Oldman, born the same day in 1958, spent years being recognized primarily for supporting and villain roles before an Oscar-winning lead performance, relatively late in his career, changed how he was seen. This is the exact date the month's stone-and-flower assignments flip: aquamarine and daffodil, claimed by the Pisces days just past, give way to the stone and flower more often tied to Aries — bloodstone or diamond, and the thorny, resilient honeysuckle — marking a birthday that has genuinely crossed the calendar's own cusp. Matthew Broderick and Rosie O'Donnell, both also born March 21, built careers on very different kinds of persistence in show business, Broderick moving fluidly between stage and screen across four decades while O'Donnell built a long-running daytime talk show out of an already-established stand-up and film career. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, among the works produced during those disciplined years of weekly composition, were themselves largely ignored during his lifetime and only rediscovered as major works nearly a century after his death, a delayed breakthrough of exactly the kind Selma and Namibia both eventually achieved on their own terms.