Top 10 Famous People from Minnesota

Top 10 Famous People from Minnesota

Minnesota is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. It is bounded by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north, by Lake Superior and the state of Wisconsin to the east, and by the states of Iowa to the south and South Dakota and North Dakota to the west. Its capital is Saint Paul.

The name Minnesota comes from the Dakota tribe’s word for the Minnesota River, mnisota, meaning “cloudy, muddy water” or “sky-tinted water.” The Land of 10,000 Lakes is home to many amazing talents. Here are the top 10 famous people from Minnesota;

1. Prince

Prince – Wikipedia

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 7, 1958. He was an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, actor, producer, dancer, and performer on keyboards, drums, and bass. He was known for his flamboyant, androgynous persona and wide vocal range, which included a far-reaching falsetto and high-pitched scream.

Prince’s lyrics often address sexuality and desire with frankness and imagination. His recording career began with funk and soul marketed to a Black audience. Later records incorporated a vast array of influences, including jazz, punk, heavy metal, the Beatles, and hip-hop, usually within an overall approach most informed by funky up-tempo styles and soulful ballads.

His awards included the Grammy President’s Merit Award, the American Music Awards for Achievement and of Merit, the Billboard Icon Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2006, the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2016, and will be inducted into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame in 2022.

Prince was found dead at his Paisley Park estate on April 21, 2016.

2. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key – Wikipedia

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and screenwriter who was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era’s newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.

He is now known as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, having published four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known), and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously, four story collections, and 164 short stories.

He died on 21^st December 1940.

3. Judy Garland

Judy Garland – Wikipedia

Frances Ethel Gumm professional know as Judy Garland was born on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. She was an American actress and singer, widely known for her breakthrough role as Dorothy in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.

With a career spanning 45 years, she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in A Star Is Born (1954) and a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Garland became the youngest and first female recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the film industry. In 1997, she was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the eighth-greatest female screen legend of classic Hollywood cinema.

She died on June 22, 1969, at the age of 47.

4. Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan – Wikipedia

Robert Allen Zimmermam professional known as Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. He is an American singer-songwriter, author and visual artist who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s. No other contemporary songwriter has produced such a vast and profound body of work: songs that feel at once awesomely ancient and fiercely modern.

Dylan has been an active voice for social and political change with some of his lyrics incorporated a range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. His songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963) and “The Times They Are a-Changin'” (1964) became anthems for the civil rights.

He has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, ten Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Pulitzer Prize Board in 2008 awarded him a special citation for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”. In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”

5. Peter Agre

Peter Agre – Wikipeda

Peter Agre was born on January 30, 1949 in Northfield, Minnesota. He is an American physician, Nobel Laureate, and molecular biologist. He shared his Nobel Prize with Roderick MacKinnon. They won the Nobel Prize for studies of tiny transportation tunnels in cell walls, work that illuminates diseases of the heart, kidneys and nervous system.

In addition to the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Agre was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, the American Philosophical Society in 2004, the National Academy of Medicine in 2005, and the American Society for Microbiology in 2011. Agre has received 19 honorary doctorates from universities around the world, including Japan, Norway, Greece, Mexico, Hungary, and the United States.

6. Jessica Lange

Jessica Lange – Wikipedia

Jessica Phyllis Lange was born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minnesota. She is an award-winning American actress known for her versatility and intelligent performances. Lange holds the record for most nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film.

She is the 13th actress to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting, having won two Academy Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award, along with a Screen Actors Guild Award and five Golden Globe Awards.

Additionally, she is the second actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress after winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the third actress and first performer since 1943 to receive two Oscar nominations in the same year, the fifth actress and ninth performer to win Oscars in both the lead and supporting acting categories, and tied for the sixth most Oscar-nominated actress. She is the only performer ever to win Primetime Emmy Awards in both the Outstanding Supporting Actress and Outstanding Lead Actress categories for the same miniseries. Lange has also garnered a Critics Choice Award and three Dorian Awards, making her the most honored actress by the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association. In 2014, she was scheduled to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but she has yet to claim it.

7. Walter Breuning

Walter Breuning – Wikipedia

Waiter Breuning was born in Melrose, Minnesota on September 21, 1896. He was an American supercentenarian who was the Oldest Living Man between July 18, 2009 and his death in 2011. He holds the record as the longest living person born in Minnesota.

In July 2009, Walter Breuning, officially became the Guinness World Record holder as “World’s Oldest Man” after the passing of Henry Allingham, a Brit who died at age 113. As of 2021, Breuning is the third-oldest verified American man ever, behind Danish-born Christian Mortensen and Mathew Beard, as well as the second-oldest man ever born in the United States.

8. William O. Douglas

Justice William O Douglas – Wikipedia

William Orville Douglas was born in Maine Township in Minnesota on October 16, 1989. He was an American jurist and politician who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States for 36 years and 211 days, the longest in the history of the Supreme Court.

Douglas succeeded Justice Louis D. Brandeis on the Supreme Court in 1939 at the age of 40, one of the youngest justices appointed to the court. He served on the Court until his retirement in 1975.

He died in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 1980.

9. Marvel Cooke

Marvel Cooke – Wikipedia

Marvel Jackson Cooke was born on April 4, 1903, in Mankato, Minnesota. She was a pioneering American journalist, writer, and civil rights activist. She was the first African American woman to work at a mainstream, white-owned newspaper.

Cooke began her journalistic career in 1926 working with W.B. Dubois, editor of NAACP magazine, The Crisis. There, she and Ella Baker first investigated the ‘Bronx Slave Market’ in 1935– a series she later reprised alone at the New York Compass as the publication’s first Black and only woman reporter.

Cooke died of leukemia in New York in 2000, at the age of 97.

10. Winona Ryder

Winon Ryder – Wikipedia

Winona Laura Horowitz professionally known as Winona Ryder was born on October 29, 1971 in Winona, Minnesota. She is an American actress who made her name in the ’80s and ’90s playing effortlessly cool, supremely stylish outsiders, later playing more prominent roles.

She won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture and the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress for the movie ‘Age of Innocence’ (1993). In 2000, Ryder received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.