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Left to right: Denzel Washington, Ryan Seacrest, Sarah Paulson and Gayle King celebrate milestone birthdays in December.
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Dec. 4: Marisa Tomei, 60
After breaking out on the daytime soap opera As the World Turns and the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World, Brooklyn-born actress Marisa Tomei proved her Hollywood star status when she won the best-supporting-actress Oscar for her hilarious turn in My Cousin Vinny. She went on to earn additional Academy Award nominations for In the Bedroom and The Wrestler, though younger audiences may know her best as Aunt May, opposite Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Last month, Tomei returned to the New York City stage with the off-Broadway play Babe, in which she stars as a legendary record producer facing shifting workplace gender politics.
Dec. 8: Teri Hatcher, 60
A former NFL cheerleader, Teri Hatcher struck TV gold twice, first in the ‘90s as Lois Lane on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and then in the 2000s as Susan Mayer on Desperate Housewives, for which she won a Golden Globe. Following recent recurring turns on shows like The Odd Couple and Supergirl, she has become a fixture on TV holiday romances like A Kiss Before Christmas, Christmas at the Chalet and How to Fall in Love by Christmas. And on the darker end of the spectrum, she also starred this summer in Lifetime’s The Killer Inside: The Ruth Finley Story, a scary true-crime tale about a woman in 1970s Wichita who’s being stalked.
Dec. 9: Judi Dench, 90
It’s been nearly seven decades since the future Dame Judi Dench made her stage debut with the Old Vic Company as Ophelia in Hamlet in 1957. Over the next two decades as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she played every leading female role the Bard ever wrote. Despite her critical acclaim at home in England, it wasn’t until 1995, when she started playing M in the James Bond franchise, that American audiences began to take notice. Dench earned her first Oscar nod for playing Queen Victoria in 1997’s Mrs. Brown and took home the supporting-actress trophy the following year playing a different queen (Elizabeth I) in Shakespeare in Love— despite being on screen for only eight minutes. In the years since, she has received critical acclaim (and six more Oscar nominations) for performances in films like Notes on a Scandal and Belfast, and she has hinted that she may be retiring from acting due to vision loss from macular degeneration.
Dec. 10: Bobby Flay, 60
The Food Network mainstay got his start in the culinary world at a young age. After dropping out of high school, he toiled as a substitute busboy at a Manhattan restaurant, went to the French Culinary Institute, and worked his way up in the New York City restaurant scene. In 1991, he opened the Southwestern-tinged Mesa Grill, quickly winning the Rising Star Chef of the Year Award from the James Beard Foundation. His brash charisma made him a natural fit for the burgeoning world of food television. After making a name for himself on Iron Chef America, he has hosted cooking and competition shows, travelogues and his trademark series Beat Bobby Flay. In 2015, he became the first chef with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He’s not going anywhere, either: In November, he signed a new multiyear deal with Food Network.
Dec. 10: Meg White, 50
As one-half of the White Stripes, the Michigan-born drummer helped redefine the sound of indie rock in the early 2000s. She and vocalist-guitarist Jack White released their self-titled debut in 1999 and instantly became known for their unique style (always red, black and white outfits) and air of mystery: Though they claimed to be brother and sister, journalists later discovered that they were actually divorced, and Jack had taken her last name. While the band only notched three entries on the Billboard Hot 100 — peaking at 26 in May 2007 with “Icky Thump” —they picked up four Grammy wins, including Best Rock Song for the anthemic "Seven Nation Army," before breaking up in 2011. Always one to value her privacy, White hasn’t made a public appearance in 15 years.
Dec. 11: Brenda Lee, 80
Earning the nickname Little Miss Dynamite early in her career, the Rock and Roll and Country Music Hall of Famer signed her first record deal at the age of 11. She quickly racked up Top 10 hits like “I’m Sorry” and "I Want to Be Wanted." Over the decades, she recorded tunes across many genres, including rockabilly, pop, rock and especially country, and Rolling Stone recently ranked her No. 161 on its list of the best singers of all time. In 2023, she re-entered the pop-culture conversation when her holiday classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart, 65 years after the song’s 1958 release. That made her the oldest woman to hit No. 1 — and marked the longest gap between an artist’s first and most recent chart-topping songs.
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