43.2967° N, 5.3764° E

MARSEILLE

Most Famous People Born in Marseille, France

Notable people

2,271

Peak decade

1940s

Median birth year

1928

Most distinctive

Sculptor 2.8×

A Greek colony founded around 600 BC that is still, stubbornly, a Mediterranean city rather than a French one. Marseille's distinctive professions are sculptors, painters, and poets — the trades of a port city with a heavy North African and Italian presence and a long Mediterranean visual-arts lineage. Zinedine Zidane and Eric Cantona are both from here, as are Antonin Artaud and Edmond Rostand, and the 18th-century bench is unusually deep for a city outside Paris.