Famous Helens
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40 free Famous Helens trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Helen has been a famous name for about three thousand years. It belonged to the most beautiful figure in Greek myth, to a deafblind girl from the American South who became one of the most admired writers and campaigners of her century, and to a long line of actresses, singers, politicians, athletes and astronauts since. This quiz gathers the famous Helens in one place. Most questions name a Helen and ask what she did: the role that won the Oscar, the song that topped the chart, the office she held or the record she set. Others cover the fictional Helens of novels, sitcoms, cartoons and films, and a few things that only borrowed the name, from a volcano to a mountain town. It works as a themed pub quiz round, as a party game for the Helen in your life, or for anyone who likes general knowledge with a twist. The questions run from household names to a handful of deep cuts, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word did Helen Keller first grasp when it was spelled into one palm while the real thing ran over the other?
Water
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.
Q 02Helen Mirren won her Best Actress Oscar for playing which British monarch?
Elizabeth II
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.
Q 03In the best-known myth, Zeus fathered Helen of Troy after coming to her mother Leda in the form of which bird?
A swan
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.
Q 04Helen was the little-used first name of which children's author, who bred Herdwick sheep in the Lake District?
Beatrix Potter
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.
Q 05Singer Helen Kane went to court in the 1930s claiming her baby-talk style had been copied for which cartoon character?
Betty Boop
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.
Q 06Which singer of Smooth Operator, born in Nigeria and brought up in England, has Helen as her real first name?
Sade
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.
Q 07Mount St. Helens, the volcano whose 1980 eruption killed 57 people, stands in which US state?
Washington
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.
Q 08Helen Fielding's unsigned column in the Independent newspaper grew into novels about which fictional singleton?
Bridget Jones
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.
Q 09The millihelen is a joke unit of beauty named after Helen of Troy: the amount needed to launch one what?
Ship
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.
Q 10British actress Helen Baxendale played Emily Waltham, who marries which character at a London wedding in Friends?
Ross Geller
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.
Q 11Which graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind became Helen Keller's teacher and companion for 49 years?
Anne Sullivan
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.
Q 12Helen Hunt won a Best Actress Oscar as a waitress and single mother opposite Jack Nicholson in which romantic comedy?
As Good as It Gets
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.
Q 13Australian-born Helen Reddy topped the US chart in December 1972 with which song she had helped to write?
Q 21Helen Keller appears on the 2003 quarter of which US state, the only circulating US coin to feature braille?
Alabama
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.
Q 22Which teenage actress won an Oscar as Helen Keller in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker, after playing her on Broadway?
Patty Duke
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.
Q 23Chemist Helen Sharman, the first Briton in space, spent most of an eight-day mission in 1991 aboard which station?
Mir
I Am Woman
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.
Q 14Helen of Troy was first married to which king of Sparta, the younger brother of the Greek commander Agamemnon?
Menelaus
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.
Q 15Helen McCrory, who played Cherie Blair in two films, was the matriarch Polly Gray in which BBC crime drama?
Peaky Blinders
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.
Q 16First Lady Helen Taft arranged for which gift from the mayor of Tokyo to be planted in the US capital?
Cherry trees
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.
Q 17Which star of The Piano voices Helen Parr, the stretchy superhero mother Elastigirl, in Pixar's The Incredibles?
Holly Hunter
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.
Q 18Helen Clark, later the first woman to head the UN Development Programme, was prime minister of which country?
New Zealand
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.
Q 19Which actress plays Helen Tasker, unaware that her salesman husband is really a spy, in James Cameron's True Lies?
Jamie Lee Curtis
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.
Q 20Which band toured Britain in early 1963 as a support act to the 16-year-old chart-topper Helen Shapiro?
The Beatles
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.
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.
Q 24Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, spent 32 years as editor-in-chief of which magazine?
Cosmopolitan
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.
Q 25Actress turned congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas lost a bitter 1950 Senate race to which future president?
Richard Nixon
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.
Q 26Helen Slater made her name in 1984 by flying across cinema screens in the title role of which DC Comics film?
Supergirl
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.
Q 27Helen Burns, the gentle friend who dies of consumption at Lowood School, appears in which Charlotte Brontë novel?
Jane Eyre
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.
Q 28In The Simpsons, the gossipy Helen Lovejoy is married to the man who holds which job in Springfield?
Church pastor
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.
Q 29Which Elizabethan playwright has a scholar conjure Helen of Troy for his students in the tragedy Doctor Faustus?
Christopher Marlowe
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.
Q 30Roxie Roker, who played Helen Willis in the sitcom The Jeffersons, was the mother of which rock musician?
Lenny Kravitz
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.