Famous People Born in Missouri a to z

Filmmaker Robert Altman is best known for his highly individualistic films and use of simultaneous layers of dialogue.

Maya Angelou is a poet and prize-winning memoirist. She is the author of the critically acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Actor Ed Asner is best known as gruff-but-lovable newsman Lou Grant, who debuted on TV sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He also lent his voice to the movie Up.

Josephine Baker was a dancer and singer who became wildly popular in France during the 1920s. She also devoted much of her life to fighting racism.

Ma Barker is best known for supposedly leading the criminal behavior of her four sons.

Thomas Hart Benton was an esteemed 20th century painter and muralist renowned for works like “America Today” and “Persephone.”

Yogi Berra is best known as a Yankees player who was widely considered one of the best catchers of all-time. Later in life, he managed the team, becoming only one of six managers to lead both National and American League teams to the World Series.

Chuck Berry was one of the most popular and influential performers of rhythm-and-blues and rock 'n' roll music during the 1950s, '60s and '70s. He's known for songs like "Johnny B. Goode" and "My Ding-a-Ling."

Linda Blair is an Academy Award-nominated actress and animal activist known for her role as a demonically possessed girl in The Exorcist.

Molly Brown was best known for her social welfare work on behalf of women and children, and for surviving the Titanic sinking.

American mezzo-soprano and soprano Grace Bumbry is considered one of the leading opera singers of her generation.

T Bone Burnett is a Grammy Award-winning musician and producer who has worked on several popular films, including The Big Lebowski and Crazy Heart.

William S. Burroughs was a Beat Generation writer known for his startling, nontraditional accounts of drug culture, most famously in the book Naked Lunch.

Calamity Jane was a woman of the Wild West who was respected for her talent with a gun and kindness toward others.

Television Actress Jessica Capshaw is best known for playing lawyer Jamie Stringer on The Practice and a lesbian doctor named Arizona Roberts on the ABC drama Grey’s Anatomy.

Dale Carnegie is the author of How To Win Friends and Influence People, one of the bestselling self-help books of all time.

George Washington Carver was a prominent African-American scientist and inventor. Carver is best known for the many uses he devised for the peanut.

Don Cheadle is a critically acclaimed actor who has appeared in such films as Crash, Boogie Nights and Out of Sight.

Short-story writer and novelist Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening, a novel about a young mother who abandons her family, initially condemned but later acclaimed.

Physicist Steven Chu was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work on cooling atoms, and became the U.S. Secretary of Energy in 2009.

Actress Sarah Clarke is best known for her roles as Nina Myers on the television drama 24 and Renée Dwyer in the Twilight saga.

Singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow sang backup for stars like Rod Stewart before becoming a star in own right. Her 1996 album Sheryl Crow won two Grammys.

Jack Dorsey is an American businessman best known as the founder of the social networking site Twitter.

T.S. Eliot was an American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.

Eminem is an American rapper, record producer, and actor, who is known as one of the most controversial and best-selling artists of the early 21st century.

American Country music singer-songwriter Sara Evan made the hit albums Real Fine Place and Stronger. Her song "Born to Fly," won a 2001 Country Music Award.

Martha Gellhorn was a distinguished war correspondent who covered every war that occurred across the globe over a period extending nearly 60 years.

Betty Grable was a musical film star and popular pin up model, after starting as a chorus-line dancer in the 1930's.

In 2007, actor Jon Hamm took on his most famous character to date, playing philandering ad executive Don Draper in the American Movie Classics show Mad Men.

Jean Harlow was an American actress who proved herself a platinum-blonde sex-symbol and able comedian in 1930s Hollywood.

Coleman Hawkins was an influential tenor saxophone player and one of the first prominent jazz musicians to be known for the instrument.

Astronomer Edwin Hubble revolutionized the field of astrophysics. His research helped prove that the universe is expanding, and he created a classification system for galaxies that has been used for several decades.

Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, and playwright whose African-American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Jesse James was a bank and train robber in the American Old West, best known as the leading member of the James-Younger gang of outlaws.

Don Johnson is an actor who rose quickly to fame as undercover police office Sonny Crockett on the hit TV series Miami Vice.

Casey Jones was a railroad engineer known for his speed who died in 1900, when he collided with another train. He was immortalized as an American folk hero with the release of Wallace Saunders's song "The Ballad of Casey Jones."

Jack Kilby was an American physicist and electrical engineer who co-created the integrated circuit.

Kevin Kline is an American actor known for his versatility, from roles in Shakespearean plays to parts in dramatic films, including Sophie's Choice and A Fish Called Wanda.

Best known as Enron business executive who was convicted of conspiracy and fraud. 20,000 Enron employees lost their jobs and life savings.

Conservative Rush Limbaugh hosts the syndicated and controversial radio talk show, The Rush Limbaugh Show. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.

Jeffrey Lundgren was an Ohio-based cult leader who murdered a family of five.

Bernarr MacFadden was a well known physical culturist, and became the preeminent advocate for healthy living and exercise.

Michael McDonald is an American singer and songwriter best known as a former member of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.

Actress Geraldine Page, born in Missouri 1924, was well respected for her dedication to her roles on stage and screen, winning an Oscar and an Emmy.

Thomas Pendergast was a political boss of Kansas City in the early 20th century.

J.C. Penney was best known as an American businessman who founded a retail chain under the same name. His stores today sell general merchandise for the home.

American actor Vincent Price starred as the villain in the 1953 film House of Wax, which revitalized the horror genre, and was one of the first films shot in 3D.

Doris Roberts played the role of meddling mother Marie Barone on the hit television comedy Everybody Loves Raymond.

Ginger Rogers was a prolific Oscar-winning actress, singer and dancer who was revered for her cinematic footwork with Fred Astaire.

Kimora Lee Simmons is a former model, ex-wife to Russell Simmons, creator of a fashion line called Baby Phat and star of her own reality TV show.

Fashion designer Kate Spade launched her own line of handbags. Her company has grown to include several retail outlets and a wider range of categories.

Sworn in as the 33rd president after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's sudden death, Harry S. Truman presided over the end of WWII and dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

An adventurer and wily intellectual, Mark Twain wrote the classic American novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Dick Van Dyke is an American actor and comedian best known for hosting The Dick Van Dyke Show. He's also known for starring on Diagnosis Murder and for roles in films like Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Night at the Museum.

Actor Jack Wagner rose to fame as the rocker Frisco Jones on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.

Tom Watson is an American golfer and six-time PGA Player of the Year. He was one of the sport's dominant figures in the 1970s and '80s.

Faye Wattleton, former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood—as well as the first African-American, first female and youngest president in the organization's history—has been one of the strongest champions of women's rights and reproductive health for more than four decades.

Jazz musician Ben Webster (1909–1973) played tenor saxophone with jazz greats like Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and Art Tatum.

Pearl White was an American silent film actress best known for her role in The Perils of Pauline, in which she did her own stunt work.

Roy Wilkins was best known as the executive director of the NAACP and a leader of the African-American civil rights movement.

Actor Mykelti Williamson has appeared in films such as Forrest Gump and Free Willy, and on TV shows such as 24.

Shelley Winters was a popular American actress who is perhaps most remembered for her starring role in the 1951 film A Place in the Sun, for which won an Oscar.

The singer of such hits as "Single White Female," Chely Wright made news in 2010 when she came out as the first openly gay country star.

Jane Wyman was a Academy Award-winning American screen actress who was also Ronald Reagan's first wife.