September 6 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on September 6

• Jane Curtin (1947)

  American actress and comedian, one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live and star of Kate & Allie.

• Rosie Perez (1964)

  American actress, dancer, and choreographer known for Do the Right Thing and White Men Can't Jump.

• Idris Elba (1972)

  British actor known for The Wire, Luther, and roles in the Marvel and DC film franchises.

• Naomie Harris (1976)

  British actress known for the James Bond film series and her Academy Award-nominated role in Moonlight.

This Day in History

• 1620 — The Mayflower departed Plymouth, England, carrying colonists across the Atlantic to what would become the Plymouth Colony.

• 1901 — President William McKinley was shot by an assassin at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York; he died eight days later.

• 1997 — The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was held at Westminster Abbey, watched by an estimated global television audience in the hundreds of millions.

What September 6 Says About You

The Mayflower's departure from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620 (recorded under the Julian calendar England used at the time), is the kind of historical footnote that reads small on paper and turned out enormous in consequence — 102 passengers setting out on a ship built for cargo, not for a two-month Atlantic crossing, toward a colony that hadn't been secured yet. Two very different departures followed on the same calendar date in later centuries. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo by an anarchist assassin, dying eight days later and elevating Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency at 42, still the youngest man to hold the office. And in 1997, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was held at Westminster Abbey, drawing a global television audience estimated in the hundreds of millions, a scale of collective attention few single events before or since have matched. Four actors born on September 6 have each, in their own way, become defined by range rather than repetition. Jane Curtin, born in 1947, was one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live before building a separate career in sitcoms. Rosie Perez, born in 1964, brought a distinct physicality from her background as a choreographer into her earliest film roles. Idris Elba, born in 1972, moved between British television, American prestige drama, and blockbuster franchise work without settling into a single register. And Naomie Harris, born in 1976, has balanced a long run in the James Bond films with an Academy Award-nominated performance in Moonlight. Numerology assigns the day-of-month digit 6 to responsibility, care, and a pull toward home and community, an odd but not unfitting thread running through a date defined by a ship full of people risking everything for a new home, a presidency reshaped in an instant, and a funeral that briefly made an entire planet feel implicated in one family's grief. As a Virgo date, September 6 carries the sign's grounded attentiveness, well suited to a birthday whose real history keeps circling back to duty and consequence rather than spectacle for its own sake. The Mayflower's own crossing took a punishing 66 days, far longer than planned, and the ship arrived off Cape Cod well north of its intended destination near the mouth of the Hudson River, a navigational detour that shaped where the Plymouth Colony was ultimately founded, since the colonists had originally been chartered to settle much farther south near the Hudson River. September's stone and flowers, sapphire alongside the aster and morning glory, are assigned month-wide rather than to September 6 in particular, but sapphire's traditional reputation for steadiness fits naturally here, on a date whose real history — a ship full of colonists risking everything, a presidency upended in an instant, a funeral that stopped the world for an afternoon — kept asking something serious of everyone involved.