October 4 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on October 4

• Rutherford B. Hayes (1822)

  19th President of the United States, whose disputed 1876 election was resolved through a special electoral commission.

• Charlton Heston (1923)

  American actor known for epic film roles including Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments.

• Susan Sarandon (1946)

  American actress known for Thelma & Louise and her Academy Award-winning role in Dead Man Walking.

• Alicia Silverstone (1976)

  American actress known for her role in the 1995 film Clueless.

This Day in History

• 1883 — The Orient Express made its first journey, departing Paris on a long-distance route that would eventually reach Constantinople.

• 1957 — The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth, marking the start of the Space Age and the space race.

• 1965 — Pope Paul VI addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the first time a reigning pope had visited the Americas.

What October 4 Says About You

For a single day on the calendar, October 4 has an outsized claim on the idea of setting off toward somewhere new: the Orient Express departed Paris on its first journey in 1883, launching one of the most storied long-distance train routes in history, and just over seventy years later, on this same date in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into orbit, opening an entirely different kind of long-distance journey and effectively starting the Space Age. Between a luxury train bound for Constantinople and a beeping metal sphere bound for orbit, October 4 has repeatedly marked the moment something ambitious actually left the ground. Pope Paul VI added his own kind of first to the date in 1965, becoming the first reigning pope to visit the Americas when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, a diplomatic journey of a very different sort but a journey nonetheless. Someone born on October 4 shares a birthday with Charlton Heston, an actor who spent a chunk of his career playing figures who set out on enormous, world-altering journeys on screen — Moses leading an exodus, Judah Ben-Hur crossing an empire — which makes for a fitting, if coincidental, echo of the date's real historical pattern. This is a Libra birthday, and it carries the numerology day number 4, a number traditionally tied to discipline, structure, and reliability rather than raw adventurousness — an interesting pairing with a date whose actual history skews so heavily toward bold departures. Read together, though, they make sense: launching the Orient Express or a satellite requires exactly the kind of engineering discipline and structural planning that the number 4 is associated with, even if the destination is romantic or historic. Susan Sarandon, born on this date in 1946, has built a career playing characters who make one big, disciplined decision and then live entirely inside its consequences, a pattern that suits October 4 rather well. The birthstones associated with the month, opal and tourmaline, and the birth flowers, marigold and cosmos, don't tie directly into any of this date's launches or journeys, but opal in particular has long been prized for the way its color seems to move and shift depending on the light — not unlike a date that keeps launching things that end up traveling a very long way from where they started. Rutherford B. Hayes's contested 1876 election was ultimately resolved through a backroom arrangement now known as the Compromise of 1877, in which Hayes secured the presidency in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South, a deal that effectively ended Reconstruction. Charlton Heston served six terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1960s and 1970s before later becoming a prominent, more conservative public figure as president of the National Rifle Association, a political evolution that surprised many who remembered his earlier civil-rights-era activism.