List of Famous people who born in 1953

Russell Mulcahy is an Australian film director. Mulcahy's work is recognisable by the use of fast cuts, tracking shots and use of glowing lights, neo-noir lighting, windblown drapery, and fans. He was one of the most prominent music video directors of the 1980s and he has also worked in television since the early 1990s. He is known for directing Highlander (1986) and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007).

Ibrahim Yaqoub El Zakzaky to a Fulani mallawa clan in Zaria, is an imprisoned outspoken and prominent Shi'a Muslim leader in Nigeria. He is the head of Nigeria's Islamic Movement, which he founded in the late 1970s, when a student at Ahmadu Bello University, and began propagating Shia Islam around 1979, at the time of the Iranian revolution—which saw Iran's monarchy overthrown and replaced with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. Zakzaky believed that the establishment of a republic along similar religious lines in Nigeria would be feasible. He has been detained several times due to accusations of civil disobedience or recalcitrance under military regimes in Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s, and is still viewed with suspicion or as a threat by Nigerian authorities. In December 2015, the Nigerian Army raided his residence in Zaria, seriously injured him, and killed hundreds of his followers; since then, he has remained under state detention in the nation's capital pending his release, which was ordered in late 2016. In 2019, a court in Kaduna state granted him and his wife bail to seek treatment abroad but they returned from India after 3 days on the premises of unfair treatment and tough restrictions by security operatives deployed to the medical facility.

Li Xiaolin is party secretary and chairperson of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. She is also a member of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Vijay Amritraj is an Indian sports commentator, occasional actor and former tennis player from Madras. He was awarded the Padma Shri, India's 4th highest civilian honour, in 1983.