From a struggling young actor eating a cricket on a dare to surviving a grueling wilderness shoot that left a director speechless, Leonardo DiCaprio has always been willing to do whatever a role demands. This is his story.
From a shy lawyer in colonial South Africa to the spiritual father of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi's life was a laboratory for the proposition that nonviolent resistance is not weakness but a form of moral power capable of moving empires.
He was cut from his high school varsity team as a sophomore and responded by becoming the most famous basketball player who ever lived. The story of Michael Jordan is a study in what competitive fury can build.
He called his compound the Kalakuta Republic and declared it independent from Nigeria. The government eventually burned it down. Fela Kuti picked up his saxophone and kept playing.
Born prematurely on a Bahamian tomato farm, raised in a world with no margin for error, Sidney Poitier walked into a segregated industry and refused to leave on its terms. He changed everything.
Margaret Thatcher broke through every barrier that British society placed before women in politics, then spent eleven years as Prime Minister pursuing policies that her supporters called a necessary revolution and her opponents called a social catastrophe.
He won twenty Grand Slam titles and held the world number one ranking for a combined 310 weeks, but the numbers alone cannot explain why watching Roger Federer play tennis felt, to millions of people, like witnessing something that belonged to a higher category of human activity.
He stood before 72,000 people at Wembley Stadium and bent an entire crowd to his will using nothing but his voice and his hands, and those who were there have spent four decades trying to describe how it felt.
From a childhood without heat or running water in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the Triple Crown of acting, Viola Davis built one of the most important careers in American performing arts through sheer, unrelenting will.
From the mountains of the Sierra Maestra to the halls of the United Nations, Fidel Castro carved out a place in twentieth-century history that no assessment of revolution, power, or Cold War politics can ignore. He was lionised and despised, but he was never ignored.