Famous People Born In York

Judi Dench is one of the most respected and decorated English actresses of all time. Counted among the most influential people in the United Kingdom, Dame Judi Dench is a patron of more than 180 charities, such as York Against Cancer. Since 1985, she has been serving as the president of Questors Theatre.

Guy Fawkes was a member of an infamous group which unsuccessfully plotted the murder of King James I. The plot, which came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot, became popular and Guy Fawkes became synonymous with the plot. The failure of the plot has been commemorated as Guy Fawkes Night, during which Fawkes' effigy is burned on a bonfire.

W. H. Auden was an Anglo-American poet. His poetry was noted for its technical achievement and versatility. He wrote poems on love, political and social themes, and cultural and psychological themes. Throughout his career, Auden was both influential and controversial. His personal life also attracted attention as he had sexual relationships with men, which was unusual at the time.

Born to educator parents, Martin Rees excelled in math since childhood. The cosmologist and astrophysicist later taught at Cambridge, Princeton, and Harvard. Known for his research on the big-bang theory, he also won awards such as the Templeton Prize and penned books such as Our Final Century.

Eighth-century Anglo-Latin poet and cleric Alcuin served as the head of the Palatine school, established by Charlemagne. A significant figure of the Carolingian Renaissance, he introduced English learning methods into Frankish schools and reformed Roman Catholicism. He also wrote extensively on education, philosophy, and theology.

Though he initially studied chemistry, Seebohm Rowntree soon joined his family cocoa business. He soon introduced employee-friendly policies, such as the 5-day work week and a pension plan, in the company. His pioneering study of working-class homes in York became an iconic sociological treatise on the poor.

John Flaxman was a British sculptor. He was a key figure in British and European Neoclassicism. Largely self-educated, he began his career as a modeler for potter Josiah Wedgwood's pottery. He then began sculpting grave monuments and earned a reputation as a prolific maker of funerary monuments. He was married to Anne Denman, who assisted him throughout his career. 

Part of the 18th-century London intellectual circle, socialite Elizabeth Montagu was a pioneering member of the Bluestockings, a group of women who engaged in evening conversations as a substitute to card-playing. The wife of affluent landowner Edward Montagu, she inherited his riches and later built the Montagu House.

Seventeenth-century English bishop John Earle is best known as the author of Microcosmographie, or a Peece of the World Discovered, which displayed his wit and humor. An Oxford alumnus, he had served as a tutor of Charles I and had been the bishop of Worcester and of Salisbury.