35.7000° N, 51.4167° E
TEHRAN
Most Famous People Born in Tehran, Iran
- Notable people
- 2,195
- Peak decade
- 1970s
- Median birth year
- 1962
- Most distinctive
- Wrestler 5.1×
A capital whose 20th century broke in half. Tehran's notables are almost entirely 1900s births, split between the Pahlavi-era filmmakers, photographers, and composers who built modern Iranian culture and the post-1979 footballers, wrestlers, and entrepreneurs who inherited it. The film share is unusually high for a non-Western city — a quiet measure of how much the Iranian New Wave punched above its weight.
One face per decade — the most globally famous figure born in Tehran during each.
Notable Births by Decade
Click a decade to filter the list below. Peak: 1970s with 380 notable births.
What Tehran Is Known For
Click any row to filter the list of people below.
Football is Tehran's biggest profession — 15% of all notables (321).
Tehran over-indexes on wrestler — 5.1× the global rate.
Profession Mix Over Time
Each band shows a profession family's share of Tehran's notable births by decade. Hover the chart for the breakdown at any decade.
- Sports
- Film & TV
- Politics & Law
- Writing
- Music
- Art & Design
- Other
- Filtered to 1870s Clear ×
Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda
1879 - 1959
Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar
1872 - 1925
Mohammad Ali Foroughi
1877 - 1942
Agha Bozorg Tehrani
1876 - 1970
Mohammad Ghazvini
1874 - 1949
Mostowfi ol-Mamalek
1875 - 1932
Darvish Khan
1872 - 1926
Mirza Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi
1874 - 1915
Hossein Pirnia
1875 - 1945
Ghassem Khan Vali, Sardar Homayoun
1874 - 1933
Mirza Mohamed Ali Khan Farzine
1878 - 1941
Malekeh Jahan
1875 - 1947
Samuel M. Jordan
1871 - 1952
Hossein Agha Malek
1873 - 1973