Famous left-handers
Left-handers have achieved greatness in many walks of life, but particularly in creative, sporting and artistic fields, where their natural talent for lateral thinking and ingenuity have made a huge contribution to all our lives.
If you are left-handed then you are in very good company. Throughout history left-handers have excelled as leaders, sportsmen, artists, musicians and in many other fields. This is our list of famous left-handers - with over 1,000 people we think it is the most comprehensive on the Web.
The list is based on our research and reports from Club members, but we know we are not perfect. If you spot any errors in our list, can provide any further information or have any famous left-handers we should add to our list, please add your information as comments to these pages.
The list contains well over 1,000 left-handers and is divided into 4 sections as below.
If you spot famous left-handers we've missed, please add them as a comment at the bottom of this page.
Links to our other pages on famous left handers
Developing our famous lefthander pages
We are working on a major redevelopment of our content on famous lefthanders to allow us to show better profiles and links to their sites, twitter feeds etc and also to allow better searching by name, sport, profession etc. and allow you to add comments to individual profiles.
We are also going to expand out activites on encouraging famous lefties to become members of the Left Handers C lub.
In the meantime, we are going to add new famous lefties we are told about below and if you see any please add them as comments to this page and we will add them to our list.
- Sebastien Loeb, WRC Rally driver extraordinaire, won a record nine consecutive World Rally Championship titles (2004-2012). He is most definitely a left hander as any photo of him signing autographs - and regularly holding champagne bottles - will prove.
Comments 254
Looking forward to being part of this group.
Many thanks!
Right handedness is the clear dominant trait, with no obvious disadvantages. However, left handedness hasn't become an extinct trait because as a minority, its advantages outweigh the negatives!
(All from here by the way: https://randomlyresearched.com/left-handers-exist/)
(from China)
Yang Yang
Zhao Jianhua
Lin Dan
Phil Tufnel b. 29 April 1966 Born England
In fact, if you pay close attention most if not all cartoon characters (Bart Simpson, Doug Funny, Chucky Finster, Chris Griffin) are south paws.
Norse god Twu -a lefthander. Origin of Tuesday (Twusday). Perfect for a lefthanded calender.
See https://www.godchecker.com/norse-mythology/TYR/
By the way, does anyone know what percentage of people born on Tuesday are left-handed?
Thanks for this site! Didn ´t know any of this kind existed. But there are so few poets — may I suggest that you add Susanna Roxman to that list? She has a Wikipedia article of her own. And I happen to know she ´s lefthanded.
-Ever heard that? ,hehe
Dick Dale
Jimi Hendrix
Toni Iommi
Paul McCartney
Paul Simon
Ringo Starr
Iggy Pop
Michelangelo
Leonardo da Vinci
Charlie Chaplin
Angelina Jolie
Keanu Reeves
Pelé
When I was at school I don't think anyone ever really noticed, let alone comment or bully about it. Although I definitely noticed an advantage with some sports like tennis and boxing. All your opponents are the same to you if you're LH, but you're unusual to them, and difficult for them to deal with.
I suppose some items that one begins to use later in life are a bit awkward (power tools where the buttons are on the wrong side of the handle and the flex is often in an awkward place, gun stocks are never designed to fit the left side of the face, etc) but it's never been more than a slight inconvenience, soon forgotten. Aeroplanes can be a bit awkward at first - the throttle is usually on the left in single seaters which means you have to fly with your right when you need most finesse of control including throttle, such as aerobatting or taking off/landing etc.
The only thing I have ever noticed at all is a slight reverence or intrigue from some work colleagues. I work in development engineering. Interestingly, about 25% of my colleagues are lefties and are considered more creative. Whether we really are or not is a moot point, I think.
I'm sorry to hear of the difficulties and discrimination some other LH people have experienced. I guess I've just been lucky. I wonder if there's possibly something a bit self fulfilling about it. If parents make children feel different because of it maybe this manifests in their interaction with other people and life in general. I don't recall my parents or siblings ever even commenting on it, let alone discussing it or making me think I was in any way different.
Doh!
I myself is a natural cross-dominance. I use right-handed scissors left-handedly, flips my pens or drumsticks with my left-hand, eat with my left, write with both hands, and type keyboard/phone mainly with my left. I play badminton with my right, and I throw with my right. And I'm right-footed. Well everything is just natural. There are only 3 people including myself could write left-handedly in my grade and I'm the only man. :)
I'm Aayushi and even I am a left handed. Even I am from India and no one around me is a leftie. It's okay to be a misfit. I've been a misfit all my life. Leftie, nerd, the kind of person who doesn't interact with others but sits to herself, I am that! But it's the people who label us who are at loss. We do just fine without them!!
With all of that said, I would not readily dismiss the point that our brains may be able to do a bit more. It's kind of like a blind person: they train their other senses to pick up the slack. In a sense, their other four senses better than mine.
We are not all born equal in a world which favours the right handers.
Due to the fact that every persons right hand side of there brain develops slower than the left side our ( lefties ) are more mentally powerful and to prove it ask any left handed person you meet how long it takes to learn something new and you will be amazed to realize your obsurd intellectual deficiency
So as I said learn before you do
Some good advise the preparations MUST take longer than the actual work you do :):)
I write, eat, shoot, play most games (not sports, per se) and perform many tasks with my left hand. There are some things I cannot do left-handed. I throw like a little kid with my left hand (but it's gotton a lot better since I started practicing.) There are a few things I simply cannot do with my right hand. When I write with my right hand (on paper or draw) it looks like a six year old's handwriting or skill. I can write on the walls or chalkboard equally well.
My parents always encouraged my handedness. In school they gave me left handed scissors, a left handed desk (this one has the angled part in the other direction -- it's a mirror of the standard right-handed student desk) and they even asked me if I wanted a left-handed ruler! Can you believe it? A left-handed ruler?! I guess you could say I was treated much better than most lefties -- and I was born in 1960!
Archimedes, I believe, was left handed. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson (? Haven't checked the list here, yet to refresh my aging memory) Leonardo DaVinci, it's rumoured that Shakespeare was a lefty as well. Yeah, Cary Grant's a lefty, so was, I believe Kate Hepburn. Also: Keanu Reeves, Julia Roberts, her brother, Eric, Bruce Willis, Obama, Gerald Ford, Reagan was a semi-ambidextrous person also, George Bush the first, Bill Clinton and many, many others in history and in all sorts of fields of endeavor for arts, sciences and entertainment/sports.
So I have always considered myself to be in pretty good company. I did ask for my right-handed desk back and I returned the left-handed scissors, too. I wanted my old desk back because the bar that holds the desk surface to the chair is on the opposite side from the right handed desks, too. Each day, when the bell rang for going out of class (like for recess, PE, lunch, going home,) I'd get up and start to leave in the same direction I always had -- and WHAM! -- I'd fall over the bar that was inexplicably in my way as I left my seat. I did that for three days and then asked for my old desk.
How many of you have heard these:
Hey! I didn't know you were Left-handed! (Like it's a secret or something, I guess, or they just now really started paying attention to you, maybe...)
Hey! You're left-handed! You write upside down, don't you? (Are you NUTS? What reason could I possibly have for writing upside down just because I'm a leftie?)
Oh, you're left-handed. You had to learn to write everything backwards, huh? (Uh... that would be, huh-uh, as in, no.)
Or the one I learned to dread, out on the baseball diamond:
Hey! Who here's left-handed? (I raise my hand and next thing you know, I'm on first base -- hey wait, I can't throw with my left hand, I play baseball wholly right-handed!)
And then they look at me like I did something wrong -- or lied about it.
LIfe's been really interesting as a left-hander. Some days harder than others, but I have learned how to use a whole host of tools with my right hands (mostly power tools, like circular saws, jigsaws, drill presses [yes! Even those are designed for right-handed operation in most cases]) and most of my sports are played right handed.
What I notice most, though, is the complete ignorance of most folks of what it takes to be left-handed as a minority on a day-to-day basis. Take a look at playing cards. Yeah, they're designed to be played and held by right-handed players. You fan them out from inside your holding hand to outside towards the shoulder. You do that in your left hand and all the little number and suite marks on the cards are hidden from view. You hold 'em in your right hand and they're right there. Yeah, even playing cards.
Happily, I actually cut with my right hand and eat with my left. One day, I watched my sister at the table, eating. I mean, really watched her while she was eating. How she held her fork, her knife and ate.
Then I noticed something I thought was really strange. She had her fork in her right hand, took a bite and started chewing. She put her fork down to the left. Picked up the fork with her left hand, picked up her knife in her right, cut her pork chop for another bite, *THEN!?!* she put her knife down, switched her fork to her right hand, then took a bite. I was stunned! That sure seemed like a lot of work for a single bite.
Me? I hold the fork with my left, cut with my right, take a bite and repeat. Simple. So I said something about it. All three of my brothers and my dad all said the same thing as my sister, "That's how you do it." So I showed them how I did it. They looked at me for a few seconds, completely silent. Then almost all of them at the same time said, "You're strange."
Life, to me, and for the most part, is funny, even if it's been pretty hard most of the time. Maybe being forced to review how you do things compared with 90% of the rest of the world who don't do it your way makes you notice things. Maybe the simple fact of having to survive in a predominantly right-handed world gives us lefties a perspective that many others don't share about handedness, but does apply to other things that are used to discriminate against others?
Maybe that's why there tend to be a higher percentage of left-handers versus the statistical norms in the arts, entertainment, academia, politics and sciences? We have to work harder and use more of our brain just to be clever enough to survive? So even though there are definitely some advantages to being left-handed, I have to wonder:
Do we get the advantages by sheer genetic stroke of handedness -- or;
Are we trained from birth to leverage and learn to adapt out of being left-handed and forced to deal with a predominantly right-handed culture?
In acient studies, of paleolithic tools, there are clear indications that handedness was about fifty/fifty. This was in a time when every person basically made their own tools, or at least knew the basics of flint-knapping, knot tying and netmaking, etc. So there was no advantage of handedness over tool and implement use, because you made your own. Custom work.
Since division of labor and specific tasks ushered in a new level of productivity, the trait for handedness has gone heavily one sided. So maybe, just maybe, we tend to be smarter or more creative because we have to be and it's learned from cultural pressure to survive and the genetic lottery of handedness isn't the direct correlation, it's an indirect result of a cultural and technological shift instead.?
This is the crap I think about in my all too often moments of curious wonder. So, do I think like this from a genetic standpoint and the handedness is merely one more genetic expression of that talent? Or did I have to get smarter due to the pressure to figure things out that weren't natural to my handedness in a culture that favors the right in almost every way imaginable? Real chicken or the egg stuff here.
I wonder if Sir Francis Bacon was a lefty?
now, I am studying dentistry. Although having so much troubles handling dental instruments - since they're created for righties - I made it to use both hands, which no one had ever done so in my faculty! in my class there are only 5 left-handed students out of 49. KUDOS TO ALL LEFT-HANDED! I am moving forward to success! so do we!
THANKS
I wonder that lefties are quite resistant to diseases than right handers and can lead life longer. Can anyone agree with me??
Keep it up :) we'll soon take over
Also do what I have witnessed two of my lefty friends doing - write only in print and use all capital letters, in fact the only time I write in cursive is when signing my name.
I am an aspiring and almost starving Write, Composer and Artist, and have worked in the Advertising Field as a copywrite full time and an Assistant Creative Director.
Peace to all !
Someone told me once that I am right-handed because that is the hand I use to hold a pen or pencil. They said the definition of which hand you use to write with is what defines you. Is this true?
m confused as to should i make my career as a pop artist specially because i live in india and here we dont have a demand for pop artists and even f i go to the us..would be able to make my mark..please suggest me..m really confused!!
Please reply,
a leftie
I am left handed and I am one of the smartest kids in my class too!
I SK I was graded as grade 3 reading level! And passed! I am in Ontario and recently got my progress report all of my subjects but math are E/G's!! Math was an E!!!!
I dont know the awnser to your question
My husband was born left handed and his father beat him to use his right.
Why ? Because of fear, because he thought it had to do something with evil or the devil.
Though is the devil left handed,?and why is Jesus sitting on the left side of God.
Correct me if I'm wrong, not much of a bible person.
push me to be a rightie.. I do alot with my right hand..But I started noticing that
many leaders were lefties..And actors and very smart and creative people. And Paul
McCartney... Hooray for us all....
I am the same way! I can only write with my left hand, but do most everything else with my right or am ambidextrous. I can only use scissors with my right, and I chop/cut things when I cook with my right. I've tried to use my left and it feels totally uncomfortable! I also use a mouse with my right. As far as eating goes, I can use silverware with either hand and it feels normal and can drink out of a coffee cup using either my left or right!
I'm the same: write with the left,but almost everything else with the right. What about the soup or dessert spoon? At the long table, are you the only one locking elbows with the diner on your left?
Ronny
Ram
ps I am left handed and it is excellent, the feeling of superiority never goes away ;)
i play the guitar left handed
My both children are right-handed but they love the fact that I throw and kick the ball with my left hand/leg. I think we lefties are multitalented people - I love acting, singing and dancing, and used to play soccer with boys in my neighborhood. I am good at languages but as equally good in troubleshooting technology. My math skills are as good as my language skills. I am a great cook (my husband and my kids say so) and am into fashion and arts per se. On the other hand (and I don't mean right hand!) I love to read articles about black holes and quantum physics from Steve Hawking.
I truly believe we are very blessed and that there is a bit of Leonardo da Vinci in all of us. Go lefties!!! :)
i proud to be left handed.. Wherever a left handed goes pple notice,
the swing of king Wasim Akram(cricketer) is left hand n my role model
The only time they don't want to show that he's left-handed is in The Sixth Sense. There he's (or someone else for that matter portraying his character) writing with his right hand.
Also Michael Rosenbaum is a leftie.
Btw, I still can't figure out of Tom Welling is left-handed or not..gotta look into it more, hahaha
And I'm a 'flaming' leftie If you could call it that;) Everything i do is with my left hand & left foot (like playing football). I love it being a leftie coming from a mom, dad and brother who are all right-handed.
literally we excel at many things from being unique to being awkward at times..
but i mostly i use both of my hands so this makes me ambidextrous one and they call this super kewl..
i love being a leftie :D
I am kind of jealous of left handers. It just seems so exotic. Hope that doesn't sound like a strange comment. I always notice left handedness and have a lot of sympathy for them, since it is such a right handers world. When I worked briefly up on UCSC campus at Porter College, there were so many students who were left handed. I mentioned it to lots of them and had many an interesting conversation about left handedness.
Anyway, glad this forum is here and no more ignorance (or at least less) in the world about this natural tendency. :)
However, I throw darts with my right hand, play golf right handed, hammer a nail right handed and, because when I was young and learning to play drums and saw other drummers playing right handed, I set my kit up that way and still play right handed now. However my left hand technique is much faster and more supple than most of my right-handed drumming peers.
I am over sixty now and when I went to school I was punished for writing with my left hand and punished again when I tried to write with my right hand because my writing was so terrible. It never deterred me. I love being left-handed. In fact I would give my right arm to be ambidextrous. (btw that's an Irish joke)
L.L.L. Long Live Lefties
I used notebooks in college, too, but I always started from the back and worked forward, the same way that books in Hebrew or Arabic go from (our) back to (our) front. I wrote on the lefthand page and progressed forward (or backward, depending on your point of view). It was a snap that way!
I was considered musically tallented and creative from a very young age,
I learnt to play the guitar (dad's) right-handed at 10, because I really couldn't be bothered to but a left-handed one. It took time to get used to it but ever since i've just been going the 'right' way (bad pun) and it hasn't bothered me. I'm glad I'm a leftie..
Oh, I'm a famous left-hander 8) heh.
I too noticed that Kermit the Frog plays the banjo left handed. Perhaps it is because (if I am not mistaken), Muppets creator Jim Henson was left handed.
XD :)
The Irish word means strange....also the Latin word 'sinistra' means dark or frightening. People through the years are frightened of anything different Bernadette - but it's okay. Even in a right-handed world..................we lefthanders are stronger because we're different.
Also, i cannot kick a ball with my left foot, nor can i catch a ball with my left hand.
I am only 10 years of age so hopefully i will learn how to catch and kick a ball with my left foot.
Wish me luck for the years to come!
:)
Got a lot of varied hobbies and interests, from Electronics and Programming (I'm an electrical engineer and entrepreneur), to some others I must share with many left-handers, just like photography, guitar and music composing.
IMO, left-handers are usually creative because they tend to think "off the box". They are also more emotionally driven than common people, which make good leaders of them.
However, some "right-handed" features like organizational skills and down-to-earth thinking must be present in order to succeed.
If you think you are a moron you will be a moron, be positive and you will be sucessful
being left handed to not a disabilty. Prince William, David Cameron, King Geoge V1, and many others can't think of are left handed. They all got through or are getting through life. YOU CAN TOO.
and my handwriting is so horrible.i think left handed are moron and stupid.one of them is me.
Alhamdullilah.
However, a sword on the left hip, with the baldric over the right shoulder (other portraits show this) is only of use to a right-hander. Unless this was part of his 'devilish trickery', is there any other evidence to show he was left-handed?
I tried to attach the photo, but couldn't get it to work.
He is a natural right hander (writes with his right too) and the only time he uses his left is during tennis.
Basically, he's simply exploiting the lefty advantage!
"As of 2009, three (four if Reagan is counted) out of the last five presidents have been left-handed.[3] Counting as far back as Truman, the number is five (or six) out of twelve. In the 1992 election, all three major candidates - George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot - were left-handed."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
He has always been predominantly right handed and so felt naturally ashamed.
I read once that a left handed boxer has an advantage in the ring due to I guess that most of all the sparring partners are right handed and that's the Leftie has to sparr with right handed boxers, but the Rightie think they don't have to adapt when they are boxing Lefties.
Vlad Zamfirescu, a Romanian actor is also left-handed.
The first person ever created on this Earth was left handed!! Don't belive me?
Well just take a look at the "Creation of Adam" in the Sistine Chapel
Now, just what hand is Adam reaching out to God?? ... Of course it's his Left.
Now "Eve", that Woman! Was right handed, yes, right handed! Just take a look at the painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder titled. "Adam and Eve". Well, Eve is tempting Adam, she is holding the apple out to Adam in her right hand. She was probably created out of a rib on Adam's right side. Now Adam is reaching out for the apple with ...you guessed it his LEFT hand.
The moral of this story is, "If God had used a rib from Adam's Left side maybe the World wold would be 90% Lefties and 10% Rghties".
Well, anyways he took the apple and the rest, well seems better than just eating an apple. That is, if the apple was just a medaphor.
.
I think it's great that Obama is left-handed as well as him being a Trekkie as well.
But David Cameron has sort of spoilt it.
J. Ahola is a lefty .... a wonderful man and a wonderful singer...
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