Born on September 15

King of England from 1189 to 1199, Richard the Lionheart was a medieval monarch renowned for his leading role in the Third Crusade (1191–1192). He embodied the chivalric ideal of his era, though he spent very little time in England during his reign.

Jean Renoir was a French filmmaker and screenwriter, the son of the painter Auguste Renoir. A major figure of twentieth-century cinema, he left his mark on the history of the seventh art through his poetic realism and his humanism.

American jazz alto saxophonist, a major figure of hard bop and soul jazz. A member of the Miles Davis sextet on the album *Kind of Blue* (1959), he went on to lead his own quintet with his brother, cornetist Nat Adderley.

Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist, a theorist of particle physics. He proposed the existence of quarks, the elementary building blocks of matter, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969.

African-American soprano considered one of the greatest operatic voices of the 20th century. Born in 1945 in Georgia, she rose to prominence on the world's most prestigious stages (the Met Opera, Bayreuth, Covent Garden). A figure in the civil rights movement, she performed *La Marseillaise* on the Champs-Élysées during the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989.

Nigerian writer