March 29 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on March 29

• John Tyler (1790)

  Tenth President of the United States, the first vice president to assume the presidency after a president's death in office, following William Henry Harrison's death in 1841.

• Lucy Lawless (1968)

  New Zealand actress known for the title role in Xena: Warrior Princess.

• Elle Macpherson (1964)

  Australian model and businesswoman.

• Jennifer Capriati (1976)

  American tennis player and 1992 Olympic gold medalist who turned professional at age 13.

This Day in History

• 1971 — U.S. Army Lieutenant William Calley was convicted by court-martial for his role in the My Lai Massacre, the only U.S. soldier convicted in connection with the killings.

• 1973 — The last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam, marking the formal end of direct American military involvement in the Vietnam War, though the war itself continued for two more years.

• 1974 — Farmers digging a well near Xi'an, China, discovered fragments of the Terracotta Army, the buried funerary sculptures of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, one of the most significant archaeological finds of the 20th century.

What March 29 Says About You

March 29 has a habit of marking real, hard endings that turned out, on closer inspection, to be more complicated than 'the end' implies. The last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam on this date in 1973, a genuine and long-awaited milestone, but the war itself didn't actually end for another two years, and the political and cultural reckoning over it continued for decades after that — an ending that was real but far from total. William Calley's conviction, on this same date in 1971, closed the legal chapter of the My Lai Massacre as the only individual ever held criminally responsible for it, even though hundreds of civilians had been killed and many soldiers were involved — a legal ending that, like the war's, left plenty unresolved. The discovery of the Terracotta Army near Xi'an on this date in 1974 offers the date's strangest twist on the theme: farmers accidentally uncovered what turned out to be the funerary guard of an emperor who died in 210 BC, a burial meant to be permanent and final that instead became one of the century's most significant open archaeological sites, still being excavated today. John Tyler, born March 29, 1790, became president through his own kind of unplanned ending, ascending to the office after William Henry Harrison's sudden death just a month into his term — an ending nobody had prepared for that reshaped the presidency's line of succession going forward. The sign presiding over the date, Aries, tends toward decisive closure by temperament, even when the larger reality underneath resists being fully closed. The numerology adds real depth to that tension: the 29th reduces to the master number 11, preserved rather than simplified to 2, tied to heightened intuition, a fitting match for a date whose real endings keep revealing themselves to be more layered than they first appear. Lucy Lawless, sharing this birthday in 1968, spent a career playing a character defined by fighting past one ending after another, never letting any single conflict stand as the last word. The month's later stretch swaps aquamarine for bloodstone or diamond and daffodil for honeysuckle under Aries, a pairing that suits a birthday whose real history keeps proving that an ending and a resolution aren't always the same thing. Elle Macpherson and Jennifer Capriati, both also born March 29, each built early, highly visible careers — modeling and professional tennis, respectively — that arrived well before either woman had reached full adulthood, echoing the date's pattern of consequential events landing before anyone involved felt fully ready for them. Qin Shi Huang's terracotta guard, discovered by the farmers digging that well, was built with individually sculpted faces for each of its thousands of soldiers, a detail archaeologists still cite as evidence of just how total the emperor's ambitions for permanence really were.