List of Famous people born in Romania

Paula Iliescu Gibson known professionally as Pola Illery, was a Romanian-American actress and singer, best known for her appearances in early French film, and of the latter after emigrating to the United States, in Hollywood films, best known for her portrayal of vamps, she appeared in both silent film and talkie films, in a decade long screen career between 1928 and 1938.

Mihail Kogălniceanu was a Moldavian, later Romanian liberal statesman, lawyer, historian and publicist; he became Prime Minister of Romania on October 11, 1863, after the 1859 union of the Danubian Principalities under Domnitor Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and later served as Foreign Minister under Carol I. He was several times Interior Minister under Cuza and Carol. A polymath, Kogălniceanu was one of the most influential Romanian intellectuals of his generation. Siding with the moderate liberal current for most of his lifetime, he began his political career as a collaborator of Prince Mihail Sturdza, while serving as head of the Iași Theater and issuing several publications together with the poet Vasile Alecsandri and the activist Ion Ghica. After editing the highly influential magazine Dacia Literară and serving as a professor at Academia Mihăileană, Kogălniceanu came into conflict with the authorities over his Romantic nationalist inaugural speech of 1843. He was the ideologue of the abortive 1848 Moldavian revolution, authoring its main document, Dorințele partidei naționale din Moldova.

Jean Yonnel was a Romanian-born French actor.

Horațiu-Valentin Mălăele is a Romanian actor, cartoonist, writer, and theater and film director. In this last capacity he is often associated with the Romanian New Wave.

Ion Theodorescu-Sion was a Romanian painter and draftsman, known for his contributions to modern art and especially for his traditionalist, primitivist, handicraft-inspired and Christian painting. Trained in academic art, initially an Impressionist, he dabbled in various modern styles in the years before World War I. Theodorescu-Sion's palette was interchangeably post-Impressionist, Divisionist, Realist, Symbolist, Synthetist, Fauve or Cubist, but his creation had one major ideological focus: depicting peasant life in its natural setting. In time, Sion contributed to the generational goal of creating a specifically Romanian modern art, located at the intersection of folk tradition, primitivist tendencies borrowed from the West, and 20th-century agrarian politics.

Simion Stoilow or Stoilov was a Romanian mathematician, creator of the Romanian school of complex analysis, and author of over 100 publications.

Alexandru C. Cuza, also known as A. C. Cuza, was a Romanian far-right politician.

Victor Mihaly de Apşa, commonly Victor Mihali, was an ethnic Romanian Austro-Hungarian bishop of the Greek-Catholic Church. Born to an old noble family in Ieud, Maramureș County, he attended a Piarist primary school in Sighetu Marmaţiei and high school in Oradea, Trnava and Košice. After graduating in 1857, he was sent to Rome by his father, encouraged by Bishop Ioan Alexi. He studied at the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, obtaining a doctorate in theology in 1863 and being ordained priest later that year. He returned to Transylvania and in 1864 was first named dean of students and later professor of church history and canon law at the seminary in Gherla. After Gherla Bishop Ioan Vancea was elected Metropolitan of Făgăraş and Alba Iulia, he took Mihali with him to Blaj as his secretary. In 1869-1870, Mihali accompanied Vancea to the First Vatican Council.