Great Lives

The cartoonish villain who turned to cocaine was once an Olympic-calibre wrestler who helped US athletes win gold

Violence silenced her, before she decided to tell the world about it

The singer had been living in quiet retirement – then one night changed everything

The Taxi star revelled in creating chaos and confusion

Once the world’s tallest mountain had been scaled, they all wanted to know: Who stepped on the summit first?

At Monaco 1984, the Brazilian announced himself as a legend – but a decade later, he was gone

PL Travers told Walt Disney to throw out the animation and that Julie Andrews was too pretty for the role

A performance in Japan meant the end of the Revolution – and began a new chapter in the life of an eccentric genius

The abstract painter wanted to make art like he was ‘rushing through a battlefield’ – so he started using his feet as brushes

The exiled writer/director knew that audiences really wanted empathy from Hollywood, not glamour

With her distinctive bold colours, grey curls and bright scarves, Saadawi became a feminist icon. Margaret Atwood called her ‘one of the great radical voices of our time’

Her remarkable wartime exploits – including a dramatic prison break – made her a legend of the French Resistance

His invention of the cassette tape revolutionised the way people listened to music – but he never patented it. 21st June 1926 – 6th March 2021

Flawed, flamboyant and freakishly gifted, Warne turned leg-spin into high art – and made every ball an event

How the creator of Peanuts created humour from loneliness and sadness

Her confrontation with Pakistan’s military rulers was rooted in a lifetime of activism that began in childhood and never wavered

How the widow of Martin Luther King Jr transformed mourning into a lifelong movement

Dismissed by friends and launched in an era when women lacked the vote, Ocampo’s Sur magazine became a defining force in 20th-century literature and politics

In 1961, before the first human reached space, a chimpanzee was strapped into a rocket and sent into the unknown

She was always adamant that she had done nothing heroic; that helping other people should be considered normal, not exceptional

Very few athletes have had to endure what the Hungarian went through in order to compete for her country

Feeling not quite Greek but not quite British, a young Georgios went down the route of many uncertain teenagers – he chose Top of the Pops as his guide

The clarity of emotion she expressed over strings and a rhythm and blues beat came as naturally to her as breathing

He never lifted the World Cup, but his intelligence and fight for democracy made him one of the nation’s most beloved footballing icons

The Irishman had a rare ability to write about mood and place, to capture the rawness of what it is to be alive

A pacy and ferocious player, disappointments weren’t uncommon throughout the Frenchman's life. Nor was depression

Lessing wrote not about poverty, but literary poverty – what happens when eager minds are deprived of books

His fans love his humour, his cheerful self-deprecation, his gritty gentleness, his ability to make sense of the brittleness of the world

The Thai duty-free magnate bought Leicester City and brought it the most unlikely title in English football history

Discouraged by the sexism she’d suffered in mountain climbing circles, Tabei took matters into her own hands

It was a dedication to nature and equality that led to Sankara’s bloody removal

It was Emilie who organised the move of their factory to Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia, one which would lead to the saving of 1,200 lives