Great Lives

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

From The Man From UNCLE to NCIS, the Scottish actor defied typecasting to become a global star and a fixture of television history

The guitar took Jimi Hendrix to stratospheric heights; first as a backing musician for the Isley Brothers and Little Richard, then to swinging London

When he won the presidency promising “the Chilean path to socialism”, the US immediately registered him as a profound ideological threat

For pretty much his entire life, Mendes was either in style or on the verge of being back in vogue, such is the world’s enduring love of Brazilian music

From a backyard shack in Kingston, Perry reinvented the idea of the recording studio – before burning it to the ground

Considering the battles that raged within her, perhaps the thing about the singer that commands most respect is not her genius, but her persistence

When Nazism came to her adopted home of France, the New Zealand journalist became a leading member of the resistance