November 5 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on November 5

• Art Garfunkel (1941)

  American singer known as half of the folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel.

• Elke Sommer (1940)

  German actress who became a prominent international film star of the 1960s and 1970s.

• Bryan Adams (1959)

  Canadian singer-songwriter known for hits including Summer of '69 and (Everything I Do) I Do It for You.

• Tatum O'Neal (1963)

  American actress who, at age 10, became the youngest competitive Academy Award winner in history for Paper Moon.

• Famke Janssen (1964)

  Dutch actress known for the X-Men film series and GoldenEye.

This Day in History

• 1605 — The Gunpowder Plot was discovered when Guy Fawkes was found guarding explosives beneath the House of Lords in London, an event still marked annually as Guy Fawkes Night.

• 1935 — Parker Brothers began selling the board game Monopoly to the public.

• 1968 — Richard Nixon was elected the 37th President of the United States.

What November 5 Says About You

A foiled assassination plot, a board game about accumulating property, and a presidential election make for an odd trio, but all three anchor themselves to November 5, and each one is fundamentally about power and who ends up holding it. Guy Fawkes was caught guarding barrels of gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament on this date in 1605, a plot to eliminate the English government in one stroke that instead became one of Britain's most enduring annual commemorations. Three centuries later, Parker Brothers began selling Monopoly, a game built entirely around the ruthless accumulation of assets at every other player's expense, cheerfully packaged as family entertainment. And in 1968, the date turned toward actual political power when Richard Nixon won the presidency. Scorpio, the sign attached to this birthday, is frequently described in astrological writing as fixated on power dynamics — who has control, who's hiding something, who's playing a longer game than they're letting on — which tracks with a date whose signature historical anniversaries are, at bottom, all stories about control changing hands, whether by conspiracy, by dice roll, or by ballot. Numerologically, the 5th reduces to day number 5, associated with adaptability, change, and restlessness, a fitting trait for a sign known for reinventing itself rather than staying static. Bryan Adams built a durable career by moving fluidly between rock anthems and orchestral ballads without losing his audience along the way. Tatum O'Neal, born in 1963, became the youngest competitive Oscar winner in history at age ten, a jarring, sudden shift in life circumstances that she later spent decades adjusting to — an early and very public initiation into change she hadn't asked for. Famke Janssen moved from modeling into acting and then into directing, a career built on repeated reinvention rather than staying in one lane. Tatum O'Neal's father, Ryan O'Neal, had co-starred with her in Paper Moon, making her Oscar win a family story as much as an individual one, and one that arguably shaped how differently child performers have been supported in the decades since. Even Guy Fawkes Night itself has evolved over four centuries from a state-mandated commemoration of a foiled Catholic plot into a broader, largely secular bonfire-and-fireworks tradition, adapting its meaning generation by generation the way day number 5 is said to favor. November's chrysanthemum, unusually resilient among garden flowers, tends to be associated in Victorian floriography with cheerfulness in the West but with more formal or funereal meaning in parts of continental Europe and Asia — a flower whose symbolism itself shifts with context, not unlike this date's own layered, power-charged history. Art Garfunkel, before Simon & Garfunkel's success fully took hold, earned a master's degree in mathematics education at Columbia University and briefly considered a teaching career as a fallback, a much quieter ambition than the one that eventually made him famous. Elke Sommer, born in Germany in 1940, grew up amid the aftermath of World War II before beginning a modeling career as a teenager that led directly into international film work by her early twenties.