Who is more famous: Chaplin, Hitchcock, Welles

Fame levels of various actors and actresses

In a previous post I used the Ngram tool to identify the fame level of several actors and actresses.

The Ngram tool produces a graph in which the y-axis shows how many times a phrase occurs in a corpus of books (making up about 6% of all books ever printed; Lin et al. 2012) relative to all remaining phrases composed of the same number of words (i.e., relative frequency) during the same time (x-axis).

The unit of fame is the famon:

• with 1 famon = 1/1 000 000 relative % Ngram frequency.

Marylin Monroe and John Wayne are at the top

The use of the Ngram tool showed the following fame levels for three of the biggest actions heroes of the 1980s and 1990s:

Arnold          25 famons

Bruce           10 famons

Sylvester      10 famons.

Their fame levels are much higher than those of two other action heroes Seagal and Van Damme. They enjoy a fame of 2 famons.

In addition, six classic actresses and actors (i.e., Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant and Marlon Brando) of the golden Hollywood era, listed by the American Film Institute, attain fame levels between 10 (Bergman) and 20 famons (Brando, Grant).

So far Marilyn Monroe,  the most popular sex symbol of the 1950s and early 1960s, and John Wayne, the popular icon because of his starring roles in Western and war movies, enjoy the highest fame, about 50 famons each.

Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin

Here I use Ngram to identify the fame of another three iconic, talented figures of the movie industry:

• Charlie Chaplin (his first work appeared in 1914)
• Alfred Hitchcock (his first uncredited work appeared in 1922 and first credited one in 1923)
• Orson Welles (his first work appeared in 1933). 

Chaplin, Hitchcock and Welles are known as actors, writers and directors. Their first appearance in the books coincides with the date of their first appearance of their work.

Ngram shows that in recent years they all enjoy a fame of about 30 famons.

This is higher than the fame levels of all stars reported above except Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne, who so far are still the fame champions of the movie industry.

Will there be any other actresses and actors from either the golden Hollywood era or from recent years that surpass Monroe and Wayne? 

Who knows. We will see.

Be tuned.