List of Famous people born in Leinster, Ireland
Conor McGregor
Conor Anthony McGregor is an Irish professional mixed martial artist and boxer. He is a former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) featherweight and lightweight champion. As of 25 January 2021, he is ranked #15 in the UFC men's pound-for-pound rankings and as of 24 December 2020, he is #6 in the UFC lightweight rankings.
Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brosnan is an Irish actor, film producer, and environmental activist. He became known as the fifth actor to play secret agent James Bond in the Bond film series, starring in four films from 1995 to 2002 and portraying the character in multiple video games.
Robert Sheehan
Robert Michael Sheehan is an Irish actor. He is best known for television roles such as Nathan Young in Misfits, Darren Treacy in Love/Hate, and Klaus Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy, as well as film roles such as Tom Natsworthy in Mortal Engines and Simon Lewis in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.
Sinéad O'Connor
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor is an Irish singer-songwriter who rose to fame in the late 1980s with her debut album The Lion and the Cobra. O'Connor achieved worldwide success in 1990 with a new arrangement of Prince's song "Nothing Compares 2 U."
Stuart Townsend
Stuart Townsend is an Irish actor. His most notable portrayals are of the characters Lestat de Lioncourt in the 2002 film adaptation of Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned, and Dorian Gray in the 2003 film adaptation of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Aisling Bea
Aisling Clíodhnadh O'Sullivan, known professionally as Aisling Bea, is an Irish comedian, actress, and screenwriter.
Bob Geldof
Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof, is an Irish singer-songwriter, author, political activist, and occasional actor. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s, who achieved popularity at the time of the punk rock movement. The band had UK number one hits with his compositions "Rat Trap" and "I Don't Like Mondays". Geldof starred as "Pink" in Pink Floyd's 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall. As a fundraiser, Geldof organised the charity supergroup Band Aid and the concerts Live Aid and Live 8, and co-wrote "Do They Know It's Christmas?", one of the best-selling singles of all time.
Charlie Bird
Charles Bird is an Irish journalist and broadcaster. He was Chief News Correspondent with RTÉ News and Current Affairs until January 2009. He took up the role of Washington Correspondent, but prematurely returned to his earlier post in Ireland in June 2010. He retired from RTÉ in August 2012.
Michael Gambon
Sir Michael John Gambon is an Irish-English actor. Having trained under Laurence Olivier, he started his career on stage at the Royal National Theatre, and went on to receive a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play for his work in David Hare's Skylight on Broadway.
Shane Lowry
Shane Lowry is an Irish professional golfer who plays on the European Tour and the PGA Tour. His notable achievements include winning the 2019 Open Championship, the Irish Open as an amateur in 2009, and the 2015 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational.
Niall Horan
Niall James Horan is an Irish singer and songwriter. He rose to prominence as a member of the boy band One Direction, formed in 2010 on the British singing competition The X Factor. Following the band's hiatus in 2016, Horan signed a recording deal as a solo artist with Capitol Records.
Paul Mescal
Paul Mescal is an Irish actor. He is best known for his starring role in the miniseries Normal People (2020), which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Evanna Lynch
Evanna Patricia Lynch is an Irish actress and activist. She is best known for portraying the role of Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter film series.
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism.
Katie Taylor
Katie Taylor is an Irish professional boxer and former footballer. She is a two-weight world champion and the current undisputed lightweight champion, having held the WBA title since 2017; the IBF title since 2018; and the WBC, WBO, and Ring magazine titles since 2019, as well as having held the WBO junior-welterweight title in 2019. Following her victory over Delfine Persoon in 2019, she became one of only eight boxers in history to hold all four major world titles in boxing—WBA, WBC, IBF, and WBO—simultaneously.
Ernest Shackleton
Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
Graham Norton
Graham William Walker, better known by his stage name Graham Norton, is an Irish television and radio presenter, comedian, actor, author, and commentator. Well known for his work in the UK, he is a five-time BAFTA TV Award winner for his comedy chat show The Graham Norton Show and an eight-time award winner overall. Originally shown on BBC Two before moving to other slots on BBC One, his chat show succeeded Friday Night with Jonathan Ross in BBC One's prestigious late-Friday-evening slot in 2010.
Aidan Turner
Aidan Turner is an Irish actor. He played the roles of Ross Poldark in the 2015–2019 BBC adaptation of The Poldark Novels by Winston Graham, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Desperate Romantics, Ruairí McGowan in The Clinic, and John Mitchell in the supernatural drama series Being Human. He played Kíli in The Hobbit film series.
Laura Whitmore
Laura Whitmore is an Irish television presenter, model, and actress. She is known for presenting I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! Now! and Survival of the Fittest. In January 2020, she began presenting Love Island and its spinoff series Love Island: Aftersun. In September 2020, she replaced Mel B as a team captain on Celebrity Juice.
Walter O'Brien
Walter O'Brien is an Irish businessman and information technologist. He was also the executive producer and loose inspiration of the television series Scorpion. He is known for various self-reported claims including a childhood IQ of 197 which have been scrutinized.