40 Fun Facts About Famous Helens

Which word did Helen Keller first grasp when it was spelled into one palm while the real thing ran over the other?

Water was the breakthrough, about a month into her lessons. Earlier that day Keller had kept confusing the words for mug and water, and smashed a new doll in frustration.

Helen Mirren won her Best Actress Oscar for playing which British monarch?

Elizabeth II had made Mirren a dame in 2003, three years before the film The Queen. Mirren played her again on stage in The Audience and won an Olivier Award for it.

In the best-known myth, Zeus fathered Helen of Troy after coming to her mother Leda in the form of which bird?

A swan was the disguise Zeus chose, and the story goes that Leda then produced an egg from which Helen emerged. Leda's husband Tyndareus was the king of Sparta.

Helen was the little-used first name of which children's author, who bred Herdwick sheep in the Lake District?

Beatrix Potter was born Helen Beatrix Potter in London in 1866 and shared the name with her mother, Helen Leech. Money from her books bought Hill Top Farm in 1905.

Singer Helen Kane went to court in the 1930s claiming her baby-talk style had been copied for which cartoon character?

Betty Boop survived the case: the judge found Kane's proof insufficient and dismissed her $250,000 claim. Kane's voice and look were still thought to be a source for the animators.

Which singer of Smooth Operator, born in Nigeria and brought up in England, has Helen as her real first name?

Sade was born Helen Folasade Adu in Ibadan and came to England at the age of four. Her stage name is drawn from her middle name, which means crowned with wealth in Yoruba.

Mount St. Helens, the volcano whose 1980 eruption killed 57 people, stands in which US state?

Washington's volcano takes its English name from Baron St Helens, a British diplomat and friend of the explorer George Vancouver, who named the peak as his ship passed the mouth of the Columbia River.

Helen Fielding's unsigned column in the Independent newspaper grew into novels about which fictional singleton?

Bridget Jones first appeared in 1995 in a column that carried no byline. Fielding's own first novel had been very different, set in a refugee camp in East Africa.

The millihelen is a joke unit of beauty named after Helen of Troy: the amount needed to launch one what?

Ship is the answer because Helen's face was said to have launched a thousand of them, so a thousandth of a helen launches one. A negative millihelen is enough ugliness to sink a battleship.

British actress Helen Baxendale played Emily Waltham, who marries which character at a London wedding in Friends?

Ross Geller's girlfriend, wife and finally ex-wife were all Emily, a part Baxendale took at 27. British viewers already knew her as Rachel Bradley in the comedy drama Cold Feet.

Which graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind became Helen Keller's teacher and companion for 49 years?

Anne Sullivan had herself been left partially blind by trachoma at the age of five. She had only just graduated when Keller's father went looking for a teacher for his daughter.

Helen Hunt won a Best Actress Oscar as a waitress and single mother opposite Jack Nicholson in which romantic comedy?

As Good as It Gets also won Nicholson the Best Actor award, a rare double for one film. Hunt was still starring in the sitcom Mad About You when she collected hers.

Australian-born Helen Reddy topped the US chart in December 1972 with which song she had helped to write?

I Am Woman had first appeared on Reddy's debut album in 1971. She helped write it because she could not find a song that matched the confidence the women's movement had given her.

Helen of Troy was first married to which king of Sparta, the younger brother of the Greek commander Agamemnon?

Menelaus won Helen in a contest among her many suitors, and the couple had a daughter, Hermione. In Homer's account the two were reunited once the fighting was over.

Helen McCrory, who played Cherie Blair in two films, was the matriarch Polly Gray in which BBC crime drama?

Peaky Blinders follows a Birmingham gang just after the First World War, with McCrory as the Shelby family's formidable aunt. Film fans also know her as the witch Narcissa Malfoy.

First Lady Helen Taft arranged for which gift from the mayor of Tokyo to be planted in the US capital?

Cherry trees along the Potomac became a lasting tourist attraction, drawing crowds each time they bloom. Taft was also the first presidential wife to publish a memoir.

Which star of The Piano voices Helen Parr, the stretchy superhero mother Elastigirl, in Pixar's The Incredibles?

Holly Hunter won the Best Actress Oscar for The Piano, in which she plays a mute Scottish woman. As Elastigirl she finally got plenty to say.

Helen Clark, later the first woman to head the UN Development Programme, was prime minister of which country?

New Zealand gave Clark's Labour Party three successive election victories before its defeat in 2008. She was the second woman to hold the office of prime minister there.

Which actress plays Helen Tasker, unaware that her salesman husband is really a spy, in James Cameron's True Lies?

Jamie Lee Curtis won a Golden Globe for the part, opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger as the secret agent Harry. True Lies was the first film to cost $100 million.

Which band toured Britain in early 1963 as a support act to the 16-year-old chart-topper Helen Shapiro?

The Beatles were on their first national tour of Britain. Along the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote the song Misery for Shapiro, but her producer turned it down.

Helen Keller appears on the 2003 quarter of which US state, the only circulating US coin to feature braille?

Alabama honoured its native daughter, who was born in West Tuscumbia and lost her sight and hearing at 19 months old. A hospital in Sheffield in the same state is dedicated to her.

Which teenage actress won an Oscar as Helen Keller in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, after playing her on Broadway?

Patty Duke took Best Supporting Actress for the part. A year later she was playing identical cousins in her own television series, The Patty Duke Show.

Chemist Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, spent most of an eight-day mission in 1991 aboard which station?

Mir received Sharman after she beat nearly 13,000 other applicants who had answered a radio advert. She had been working for the confectioner Mars on the flavour of chocolate.

Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, spent 32 years as editor-in-chief of which magazine?

Cosmopolitan was a literary magazine known for high-toned content when Brown took charge in 1965. She reinvented it as a title for the modern single career woman.

Actress turned congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas lost a bitter 1950 Senate race to which future president?

Richard Nixon painted Douglas as a communist sympathiser during the campaign. She answered by popularising a nickname that followed him for the rest of his career: Tricky Dick.

Helen Slater made her name in 1984 by flying across cinema screens in the title role of which DC Comics film?

Supergirl stayed with Slater for decades: she returned as Eliza Danvers in the 2015 television series of the same name. She also played Superman's mother, Lara-El, in Smallville.

Helen Burns, the gentle friend who dies of consumption at Lowood School, appears in which Charlotte Brontë novel?

Jane Eyre draws Helen from life: the biographer Mrs Gaskell called her an exact transcript of Maria Brontë, the author's sister, who died of the same disease at 11.

In The Simpsons, the gossipy Helen Lovejoy is married to the man who holds which job in Springfield?

Church pastor Timothy Lovejoy leads the First Church of Springfield, which most of the show's characters attend. Helen was seen but not heard while her voice actress was away.

Which Elizabethan playwright has a scholar conjure Helen of Troy for his students in the tragedy Doctor Faustus?

Christopher Marlowe has Faustus sell his soul to the devil for magical power, and the Helen he later takes as a lover is a demon in disguise.

Roxie Roker, who played Helen Willis in the sitcom The Jeffersons, was the mother of which rock musician?

Lenny Kravitz's mother broke a barrier as Helen: she and Franklin Cover played the first Black and white married couple in a regular role on prime-time television.

Helen Hayes, called the First Lady of American Theatre, won an Oscar as an elderly stowaway in which disaster film?

Airport brought Hayes the Best Supporting Actress award. She went on to become the first woman to complete an EGOT: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.

Helen Wills held a singles record, broken by Martina Navratilova only in 1990, at which tennis tournament?

Wimbledon saw Wills win eight times, a mark that stood until Navratilova took her ninth. In 1933 Wills also beat the eighth-ranked American man in an exhibition match.

Which actress became known as Helen, the queen whose affair sets off the war, in the 2004 epic Troy with Brad Pitt?

Diane Kruger, born in Germany as Diane Heidkrüger, had two hits that year. After Troy she played Dr. Abigail Chase in the heist film National Treasure.

The former logging town of Helen, Georgia, remade itself to look like an old-world village from which European region?

Bavaria was the suggestion of John Kollock, an Atlanta artist, when the town was in decline. Helen is now an alpine replica set in the Appalachians instead of the Alps.

Sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel become entangled with the wealthy Wilcox family in which E. M. Forster novel?

Howards End sets the cultured, half-German Schlegels against the Wilcoxes, rich capitalists with a fortune made in the colonies. The sisters also try to help a struggling couple, the Basts.

In the memoir H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald trains which bird of prey while grieving for her father?

A goshawk was her choice after many years as a falconer. Her father, a respected photojournalist, had died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007.

At the 2016 Rio Games, Helen Maroulis became the first American woman to win Olympic gold in which combat sport?

Wrestling gold came the hard way: Maroulis beat Japan's Saori Yoshida 4-1 in the final. As a high school freshman she had been the first girl to place at the Maryland state championships.

Helen Hunt Jackson followed A Century of Dishonor, her study of the mistreatment of Native Americans, with which novel?

Ramona was meant to move readers' hearts on behalf of Native Americans, much as Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for enslaved people. Jackson wrote it three years after her non-fiction study.

Helen Frankenthaler's stained canvases of thinned paint inspired a second generation of which school of abstract art?

Color field painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland adopted her way of letting heavily diluted oils sink into unprimed canvas. Frankenthaler named the technique soak stain.

Helen Wheels, a single by Paul McCartney and Wings, took its title from the family nickname for which vehicle?

Land Rover trips from the McCartneys' Scottish farm down to London gave the song its story as well as its name. The title is a pun on the phrase hell on wheels.