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60 free Famous People trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This is a quiz about the people everyone has heard of, built from the facts most people have not. Which world-famous scientist won Nobel Prizes in two different fields and left behind cookbooks too radioactive to touch? Which heavyweight champion won Olympic gold at 18 and lit the Olympic cauldron 36 years later? Which escape artist died on Halloween after being punched in the stomach? The 60 questions run from ancient Egypt and Rome to the Mongol steppe, Renaissance Florence, revolutionary France, Victorian London and modern Hollywood, sport and pop. Expect real names (the magician born Erik Weisz, the singer born Farrokh Bulsara), unlikely career detours (a basketball legend batting .202 in the minor leagues, a physicist who spent his old age chasing counterfeiters), odd coincidences (an author who arrived and left with Halley's Comet) and a few numbers worth remembering (years in prison, Oscars won, seconds on a stopwatch). Easy questions ask which ship carried Darwin and where Napoleon was born; the hard end asks for Queen Victoria's forgotten first name, the letter Beethoven wrote about going deaf and the learned society that made Florence Nightingale its first female member. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia biography of the person concerned, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded chiefly for his discovery of the law of what?
The photoelectric effect
The citation named 'the law of the photoelectric effect', his 1905 explanation of light ejecting electrons as quanta; relativity was judged too controversial for the committee.
Q 02Which Leonardo-attributed painting sold for a record US$450.3 million in 2017?
Salvator Mundi
Salvator Mundi, a half-length Christ blessing the world, fetched $450.3 million at Christie's New York in November 2017, then the highest auction price paid for any artwork.
Q 03Cleopatra VII, last queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, was ethnically what?
Macedonian Greek
The Ptolemies were a Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by Ptolemy I Soter; Plutarch says Cleopatra was the only one of them who learned Egyptian, which helped her pose as a native pharaoh.
Q 04On which Mediterranean island was Napoleon Bonaparte born in 1769?
Corsica
Napoleon was born at Ajaccio, Corsica, on 15 August 1769, a year after France acquired the island; his exiles were Elba and then Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.
Q 05At which Washington venue was Abraham Lincoln shot by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865?
Ford's Theatre
Ford's Theatre on Tenth Street; Lincoln died the next morning in the Petersen boarding house across the street, and Booth, a well-known actor, had performed at Ford's himself.
Q 06Marie Curie named the first element she discovered after her native country. What is the element?
Polonium
She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and her notebooks and even her cookbooks are still radioactive enough to be stored in lead-lined boxes.
Q 07Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna in 1791 at what age?
35
Mozart was 35, born in Salzburg on 27 January 1756 and dead in Vienna on 5 December 1791; he left more than 600 works, and his sister recalled him composing at five.
Q 08What is Beethoven's despairing 1802 letter about his failing hearing called?
The Heiligenstadt Testament
The Heiligenstadt Testament, written in October 1802 in the village outside Vienna where he was resting, was addressed to his brothers and found among his papers after his death in 1827.
Q 09How many years did Nelson Mandela spend in prison before his release in February 1990?
27
Mandela served 27 years, from his August 1962 arrest to 11 February 1990, at Robben Island, Pollsmoor and finally Victor Verster; his prisoner number 46664 later named his AIDS charity concerts.
Q 10Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize in 1953. In which category?
Literature
The award recognised his historical writing and speeches. He had lost the general election of 1945 within weeks of victory in Europe, then returned as prime minister in 1951.
Q 11What first name, honouring her Russian godfather, did Queen Victoria later drop?
Alexandrina
She was christened Alexandrina Victoria, the first name honouring her godfather Tsar Alexander I of Russia, and reigned as Victoria alone from her accession in 1837.
Q 12As a young man travelling to Rhodes, Julius Caesar was captured and held for ransom by whom?
Pirates
Cilician pirates seized him near the island of Pharmacusa around 75 BC; he mocked their ransom as too low, paid it, and once freed hunted them down and had them crucified.
Q 13Which philosopher tutored Alexander the Great until he was 16?
Aristotle
Aristotle taught him at Mieza from 343 BC, when Alexander was 13, until he became regent at 16; Alexander went on to found some twenty cities and died undefeated in Babylon at 32.
Q 21Which Mexican painter took up art while recovering from a 1925 bus crash that impaled her pelvis?
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo, who had survived polio at six, began painting in bed after the crash; she married the muralist Diego Rivera twice, and her blue house in Coyoacan is a museum.
Q 22Of the roughly 860 oil paintings Vincent van Gogh produced, most were made in which period of his life?
His last two years
Most of the 860 oils date from his last two years, 1888 to 1890, in Arles, Saint-Remy and Auvers; he cut part of his left ear in Arles in December 1888 and died in July 1890 aged 37.
Q 23Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) was painted in response to the bombing of a town in which country?
Q 14Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431. In which year was she made a saint?
1920
The retrial that annulled her conviction came in 1456, but canonisation took nearly five centuries; she was declared a patron saint of France two years after it.
Q 15After his 1633 trial by the Inquisition, how did Galileo Galilei spend the rest of his life?
Under house arrest
He was found vehemently suspect of heresy and forced to recant. He had discovered Jupiter's four largest moons in January 1610 with a telescope of his own making.
Q 16Charles Darwin's five-year voyage from 1831 to 1836 was aboard which Royal Navy ship?
HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle, a ten-gun brig-sloop under Robert FitzRoy, sailed from Plymouth on 27 December 1831; Darwin had trained for medicine at Edinburgh and for the clergy at Cambridge before the trip.
Q 17Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in the village of Smiljan, which lies in which modern country?
Croatia
Smiljan lies in the Lika region of modern Croatia; Tesla, an ethnic Serb born inside the Austrian Military Frontier, died in a New York hotel in 1943, and the SI unit of magnetic flux density took his name in 1960.
Q 18Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific in July 1937 while heading for which tiny island?
Howland
She was bound for Howland Island, a speck in the central Pacific where a runway had been built for her, flying from Lae with navigator Fred Noonan in a Lockheed Electra 10E; she was declared dead in January 1939.
Q 19Neil Armstrong earned his student pilot certificate at 16, before he had which other document?
A driver's licence
Armstrong got his student pilot certificate on his sixteenth birthday, before he held a driver's licence; he later flew 78 combat missions in Korea, tested the X-15 and made the first space docking on Gemini 8.
Q 20Which civil rights leader was born 'Michael' in 1929 and renamed as a small boy?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was Michael King until his father, back from a 1934 Baptist congress in Berlin, renamed them both for the reformer; he won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and was assassinated in Memphis on 4 April 1968.
Spain
Guernica, in Spain's Basque Country, was bombed by German and Italian planes on 26 April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War; Picasso painted the mural for the Spanish pavilion at that year's Paris Exposition.
Q 24Which Hollywood star was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles in 1926?
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe founded her own production company in 1955, married Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, and won a Golden Globe for Some Like It Hot before dying at 36 in August 1962.
Q 25In which Mississippi town were Elvis and his stillborn twin Jesse Garon born?
Tupelo
Elvis was born in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo on 8 January 1935, his twin Jesse Garon stillborn; the family moved to Memphis in 1948, and he died at Graceland in August 1977, aged 42.
Q 26Which boxer, born Cassius Clay, won 1960 Olympic gold and lit the Atlanta cauldron 36 years later?
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army in 1967 and was stripped of his titles; the Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction in 1971, and he beat Foreman in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle.
Q 27In 1986 Steve Jobs bought the Graphics Group from Lucasfilm for $10 million. What did the company become?
Pixar
He had been pushed out of Apple the year before after a power struggle with CEO John Sculley, and founded NeXT the same year. He returned to Apple in 1997.
Q 28Walt Disney holds the record for the most competitive Academy Awards won by an individual. How many?
22
That came from 59 nominations. He also voiced Mickey Mouse himself from Steamboat Willie in 1928 until 1947.
Q 29Barred from the US in 1952, Charlie Chaplin settled in which country for the rest of his life?
Switzerland
Chaplin settled at Corsier-sur-Vevey on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he died in 1977; he returned to Hollywood only once, for an honorary Oscar in 1972, having co-founded United Artists in 1919.
Q 30Which rock frontman was born Farrokh Bulsara to a Parsi family in Zanzibar in 1946?
Freddie Mercury
Freddie Mercury wrote Bohemian Rhapsody, which DJ Kenny Everett aired repeatedly on Capital Radio before its release; he died on 24 November 1991, a day after publicly confirming he had AIDS.