September 12 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on September 12

• Maurice Chevalier (1888)

  French actor and singer known for his charm and long career in French and Hollywood film musicals.

• Jennifer Hudson (1981)

  American singer and actress who won an Academy Award for her role in Dreamgirls after finishing third on American Idol.

• Yao Ming (1980)

  Chinese basketball player and Hall of Famer who became one of the NBA's most prominent international stars.

• Emmy Rossum (1986)

  American actress and singer known for The Phantom of the Opera and the television series Shameless.

This Day in History

• 1940 — Four teenagers exploring a hillside near Montignac, France, discovered the Lascaux cave complex, containing some of the best-preserved prehistoric paintings ever found.

• 1962 — President John F. Kennedy delivered his 'We choose to go to the Moon' speech at Rice University, committing the United States to a crewed lunar landing.

• 1992 — Mae Jemison became the first African American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-47.

What September 12 Says About You

Four teenagers looking for a lost dog, according to the most repeated version of the story, stumbled onto the Lascaux cave complex near Montignac, France, on September 12, 1940, discovering paintings of horses, bulls, and deer that had sat untouched in near-total darkness for roughly 17,000 years. It's a discovery that reframes what counts as recent on this date's timeline, since everything else associated with September 12 looks almost contemporary by comparison. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University and delivered the 'We choose to go to the Moon' speech, committing the United States to a crewed lunar landing not because it was easy but, in his framing, precisely because it was hard — one of the more quoted lines in American political rhetoric. Three decades later, in 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African American woman in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, carrying forward the kind of ambition Kennedy had articulated into a milestone he never lived to see. Four people born on September 12 built careers around performance and, in one case, athletic scale. Maurice Chevalier, born in 1888, became one of the defining faces of French entertainment for half a century, charming audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Yao Ming, born in 1980, stood 7 feet 6 inches tall and became one of the most significant bridges between Chinese basketball and the NBA, expanding the sport's global reach in the process. Jennifer Hudson, born in 1981, turned a third-place American Idol finish into an Academy Award-winning film career. And Emmy Rossum, born in 1986, moved from The Phantom of the Opera into a long-running dramatic television role on Shameless. Numerology reduces the 12th to day number 3, traditionally tied to creativity and expression, a fitting thread for a birthday connected to some of the oldest known human art and to speeches built, quite deliberately, to be remembered. As a Virgo date, September 12 carries the sign's grounded curiosity, well matched to a birthday whose real history spans prehistoric cave painters, a president looking toward the moon, and an astronaut who got there — or close enough — a few decades later. The Lascaux cave itself was sealed to the public in 1963, just two decades after its discovery, once officials realized that carbon dioxide and heat from visitors' breath were damaging the pigments, and a painstaking full-scale replica, Lascaux II, was later built nearby so tourists could still experience the paintings without endangering the originals. Insight is the trait sapphire has traditionally been credited with, a fitting one for a birthday whose real discoveries — cave paintings sealed in darkness for millennia, a moon speech meant to be remembered, an astronaut fulfilling a promise decades old — were each things that had been waiting a long time to be found; the stone itself, like the aster and morning glory, belongs to the whole month rather than to the 12th specifically.