Top 10 March 31 Birthdays

10. March 31, 1927: William Daniels. When the creators of Get Smart wanted to do a superhero spoof, they cast Daniels as Carter Nash in Captain Nice. It didn't work, partly because, at 40, he was already too old for the role. What did work was Daniels playing Mr. Braddock, Ben's father, in The Graduate; John Adams in the film version of the musical 1776 and The Rebels, and John Quincy Adams in The Adams Chronicles.

He also played Dr. Mark Craig on St. Elsewhere, and teacher George Feeny on Boy Meets World. But his best-known role may be one where we never saw his face, only heard his voice: The supercar KITT on Knight Rider.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1922: Richard Kiley. In 1965, he debuted the role of Don Quixote in the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, and became the 1st person to record "The Impossible Dream," one of the greatest pop-but-not-rock songs of the 1960s.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1934: Richard Chamberlain. He became a heartthrob in the title role in the 1960s medical drama Dr. Kildare. In the 1980s, he became the King of the Miniseries by starring in epics like Shogun and The Thorn Birds. In 1988, he starred in The Bourne Identity, making him the 1st man to play Jason Bourne.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1943: Christopher Walken. One of the weirdest actors of all time, having starred in The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone, and playing a James Bond villain in A View to a Kill and a non-costumed villain in Batman Returns.

If you want to make a claim that Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaking genius, here's your best argument: He made a film in which Christopher Walken played the least weird, and possibly the most honorable, character: Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1948: Rhea Perlman. She played Carla Tortelli on Cheers.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1950: Ed Marinaro. In 1971, as a running back for Cornell University, he finished 2nd in the Heisman Trophy balloting, the last Ivy League player to be a finalist for the award. He played 6 seasons in the NFL, including in Super Bowls VIII and IX with the Minnesota Vikings. But he's best known for playing Offer Joe Coffey on Hill Street Blues.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1971: Ewan McGregor. He has played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars franchise since 1999. And, unlike his predecessor, Alec Guinness, who hated the role, McGregor has embraced it.

9. March 31, 1934: Shirley Jones. She starred in the film versions of the musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel and The Music Man. But TV trumps movies, and she'll forever be known for playing Shirley Partridge, matriarch of The Partridge Family, opposite her real-life stepson, David Cassidy. (She and Jack Cassidy were the parents of Shaun Cassidy. She was later married to Marty Ingels.)

8. March 31, 1955: Angus Young. Ignore the schoolboy outfit: AC/DC's axeman is one of the greatest guitarists in rock and roll history.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1928: Lefty Frizzell. William Orville Frizzell was one of the top country singers of the 1950s, probably replacing Hank Williams as the best of the bunch. Unfortunately, he loved booze as much as Ol' Hank did, and only lived to be 47. Because of the similarity of their names, and their shared lefthandedness, basketball coach Charles Grice Driesell is also known as Lefty.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1933: Anita Carter. Part of country music's Carter Family, she was the 1st person to record "Ring of Fire," which her sister June co-wrote.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1935: Herb Alpert. Okay, his Number 1 hit "This Guy's In Love With You" is pretty lame, mainly because he did his own singing on it. It may have been the least 1968-sounding song to be released in 1968. But he was a great trumpeter, a great bandleader, and a great record executive: He and Jerry Moss founded A&M Records.

And if A&M had done nothing but release Herb's 1965 album Whipped Cream & Other Delights -- containing versions of The Clovers' "Love Potion Number 9" and Bobby Scott's "A Taste of Honey," and featuring one of the great album covers of all time -- that would be enough to get him onto this list.

7. March 31, 1878: Jack Johnson. The 1st black man to be Heavyweight Champion of the World remains the 2nd-oldest to have been an undisputed champion. A century later, instead of his private life inspiring hatred from both white people and "respectable" black people, it would have merely fed gossip.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1939: Karl-Heinz Schnellinger. The left back led Cologne-based soccer team FC Köln to the 1962 German Championship (pre-Bundesliga), before going to Italy. He helped AS Roma won the 1964 Coppa Italia, then helped AC Milan win that trophy 3 times, along with the 1968 Serie A title and the 1969 European Cup (now the UEFA Champions League). He was also a member of the West Germany team that reached the 1966 World Cup Final.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1965: Tom Barrasso. He holds the NHL records for most assists and points by a goaltender (in each case, 48), and helped the Pittsburgh Penguins win the 1991 and 1992 Stanley Cups.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1971: Pavel Bure. "The Russian Rocket" was a right wing who made 7 NHL All-Star Games, helped the Vancouver Canucks reach the 1994 Stanley Cup Finals, and led the NHL in goals 3 times, scoring 437 for his career.

6. March 31, 1948: Al Gore. He served Tennessee in both houses of Congress, ran for President in 1988, and was elected Vice President with Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. He didn't invent the Internet, nor did he actually claim to, but it happened a lot sooner than it would have without his help. And he was a great environmentalist.

His pride prevented him from holding the one rally with Clinton in Miami that would have saved him in the 2000 election. So, like Samuel Tilden and, ironically, Hillary Clinton, he will forever be a President-elect but not a President.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1940: Patrick Leahy. As a law student at Georgetown in 1964, he attended The Beatles' 1st full American concert, at the Washington Coliseum. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1974, and is the longest-serving current Senator, making him the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, thus 3rd in the line of succession to the Presidency. (He is also the last remaining member of either house of Congress elected in 1974, the class known then as the "Watergate Babies.") Up for re-election this year, he has announced he will not run again.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1940: Barney Frank. Born the same day as Leahy, he had a tougher task. Almost anyone could have been elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1974, but in the "Reagan Robots" year of 1980? Barney did that, from a district in the Boston suburbs. In 1987, he became the 1st member of Congress to come out as gay. He served 32 years, and became a political icon.

It bothered me that the Republicans often had very eloquent men saying rotten things, while the two Democrats saying the most important things in response were Barney Frank, who has a noticeable speech impediment, and James Carville, who has a thick Louisiana accent.

Dishonorable Mention: March 31, 1942: Michael Savage. He tells his national radio audience that "Liberalism is a mental disorder," and even published a book with that title. But he's spent most of the last 30 years proving that it's conservatism that is insane.

Honorable Mention: March 31, 1944: Angus King. The most interesting thing about him is not that he is 1 of 2 official Independents in the U.S. Senate -- the other being Bernie Sanders of nearby Vermont, and both men caucus with the Democrats. Or even that, in spite of his age and having the bearing of a very patrician New England Episcopalian (which he is), he rides a motorcycle.

It's that, in 1994, he was elected Governor of Maine, succeeding John McKernan; then, in 2002, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, succeeding Olympia Snowe -- McKernan's wife. (In the three-way election of 1994, the Republican nominee was Susan Collins, now Maine's other Senator.)

5. March 31, 1914: Octavio Paz. Mexico's greatest poet, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.

4. March 31, 1732: Joseph Haydn. "The Father of the Symphony" wrote a record 107 of them. He is also known as "The Father of the String Quartet," and was a mentor to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a tutor of Ludwig Van Beethoven.

This is like finding out Liam Neeson portrayed the trainers of both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Batman after playing Michael Collins. Come to think of it, why hasn't there been a film biography of Haydn starring Liam Neeson? I'm guessing he can do an Austrian accent, and he looks more like Haydn than Austria's leading actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, does.

3. March 31, 1596: René Descartes. The Father of Modern Philosophy, he is best known for defining consciousness as "I think, therefore I am." (In Latin, "Cogito, ergo sum"; in his native French, "Je pense, donc je suis.") But the more important piece of Cartesian wisdom may well be, "We cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt."

2. March 31, 1928: Gordie Howe. This is why he is the greatest hockey player who ever lived: At 38, he was still one of the three best players in the game; whereas, at the same age, Wayne Gretzky had to retire due to injury, and Bobby Orr had already done that 8 years earlier.

He scored 786 goals for the Detroit Red Wings, in an era when a regular season was 70 games. Wayne Gretzky scored 894 goals in an era when a regular season was 82 games. Howe had more All-Star seasons than Gretzky had seasons. And Gretzky had Mark Messier, Marty McSorley, Ken Linseman, Esa Tikkenen, Mike Krushelnyski and Dave Semenko to do his fighting for him. Gordie Howe did his own fighting. Gretzky may be known as The Great One, but Howe is known as Mr. Hockey.

But he's not Number 1 on this list:

1. March 31, 1927: Cesar Chavez. The closest thing Hispanic Americans have to a Martin Luther King, he co-founded the United Farm Workers, and became one of America's top labor leaders. His fight against the pesticides used on the farms made him a leading environmentalist, too. But he could be a hero to the right as well as to the left, because he viewed illegal immigrants as a source of strikebreakers.

Unlike Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Dr. King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, he survived the turmoil of the 1960s, living until 1993. He didn't have a dramatic death, and that has lowered his historical profile. It shouldn't.

Still alive as of this writing: Daniels, Chamberlain, Walken, Perlman, Marinaro, McGregor, Jones, Young, Alpert, Schnellinger, Barrasso, Bure, Gore, Leahy, Frank, Savage, King.