Famous Susans
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40 free Famous Susans trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Susan was among the most popular girls' names of the mid-twentieth century, so it is no surprise that it turns up everywhere: on film posters, book jackets, a dollar coin and even a wildflower. This quiz gathers the famous Susans in one place. Some questions start with a real Susan, such as an actress, an activist, an author or an engineer, and ask what she did. Others are about fictional Susans from sitcoms, comics and children's classics, or about well-known people who were born Susan and became famous under another name. It works as a themed pub quiz round, a party game for the Susan in your life, or a general knowledge warm-up. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind each one.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which star of the Alien films was born with the first name Susan and renamed herself after a Great Gatsby character?
Sigourney Weaver
Sigourney Weaver took the name at the age of 14 from a minor character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel. Her breakthrough role was Ellen Ripley, a part first meant for another actress.
Q 02Susan, an 18th-birthday present to the future Queen Elizabeth II, founded a royal line of which dog breed?
Corgi
Corgi after corgi owned by the Queen descended from Susan. She even joined the royal honeymoon in 1947, hidden under rugs in the open carriage.
Q 03Susan B. Anthony was arrested in her hometown of Rochester, New York, for doing what?
Voting in an election
Voting in an election was legal only for men in 1872, and the judge fined her $100. She told him she would never pay a dollar of it, and she never did.
Q 04Fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson found and gave her name to Sue, a skeleton of which dinosaur at Chicago's Field Museum?
Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus rex fossils rarely come as complete as Sue, with over 90% recovered by bulk. Hendrickson spotted the bones in a South Dakota cliff while her team was away repairing their truck.
Q 05Susan Boyle stunned the Britain's Got Talent judges at her first audition with a song from which stage musical?
Les Misérables
Les Misérables supplied the ballad, and more than 10 million viewers watched her sing it. Though the clear favourite, she finished second in the final behind the dance troupe Diversity.
Q 06Susan Ross dies after licking the cheap wedding-invitation envelopes her fiancé George bought in which sitcom?
Seinfeld
Seinfeld gave her one of television's darkest exits. The daughter of wealthy parents, she had earlier been fired from NBC because of her relationship with George Costanza.
Q 07Which pop star made her first major film appearance playing the title role in 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan?
Madonna
Madonna beat Ellen Barkin and Jennifer Jason Leigh to the part of Susan. The film's costumes were influenced in part by her own early style.
Q 08Susan Sarandon won her Best Actress Oscar for playing the nun Sister Helen Prejean in which death-row drama?
Dead Man Walking
Dead Man Walking brought her the award at the fifth attempt. She had already been nominated for Atlantic City, Thelma & Louise, Lorenzo's Oil and The Client.
Q 09Susan Pevensie and her three siblings step through a wardrobe into which magical land in C. S. Lewis's novels?
Narnia
Narnia crowns her Queen Susan the Gentle. Father Christmas gives her a bow with arrows that never miss their target and a magical horn that brings aid when blown.
Q 10Susan Wojcicki, later chief executive of YouTube, rented out her Menlo Park garage to the founders of which company?
Google paid her $1,700 a month for the garage in 1998. She joined the company, and later urged it to buy the video site she would go on to run.
Q 11The black-eyed Susan is the official state flower of which US state, where the Preakness Stakes is run each May?
Maryland
Maryland adopted the flower in 1918. The Preakness winner's blanket only imitates it with chrysanthemums, because real black-eyed Susans are not in bloom in May.
Q 12Susan Eloise Hinton, writing as S. E. Hinton while still in high school, produced which novel about Greasers and Socs?
The Outsiders
The Outsiders was inspired by two rival gangs at her own school in Tulsa. She wanted to empathise with the Greasers, so she wrote from their point of view.
Q 13Susan Lucci played Erica Kane for more than four decades on which ABC daytime soap opera?
All My Children
Q 21Susan Olsen played Cindy, the youngest of six siblings, for the full run of which sitcom about a blended household?
The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch cast her at just under eight years old. As an adult she said that playing Cindy made friendships difficult for her as a child, and she most disliked the episode in which Cindy tattles.
Q 22Susan Bunch, played by Jessica Hecht, is the partner of Ross's ex-wife Carol in which long-running sitcom?
Friends
Friends nearly had Jessica Hecht in a much bigger part, as she originally auditioned to play Monica.
Q 23The rotating tabletop tray known as a lazy Susan is a common sight in which cuisine's formal restaurants worldwide?
Chinese
All My Children earned her 21 Daytime Emmy nominations for lead actress but only one win, in 1999. Her losing streak became a running joke that Saturday Night Live sent up.
Q 14The charity founded by Nancy Brinker in memory of her sister Susan G. Komen funds research into which disease?
Breast cancer
Breast cancer killed Susan Goodman Komen in 1980, at the age of 36. Her younger sister believed more knowledge of the illness might have helped, and started the foundation two years later.
Q 15Susan Storm, who can turn invisible and project force fields, is a founding member of which Marvel superhero team?
The Fantastic Four
The Fantastic Four made her Marvel's first female superhero of the Silver Age of comics. Her hot-headed younger brother Johnny is a teammate, and she married another, Reed Richards.
Q 16Which actress won a Golden Globe in 2005 for playing Susan Mayer, a resident of Wisteria Lane, on Desperate Housewives?
Teri Hatcher
Teri Hatcher beat two of her own castmates, Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman, to that award. She had auditioned in January 2004 and impressed the show's creator immediately.
Q 17Loretta Long played Susan Robinson from the very first episode in 1969 until 2016 on which educational television show?
Sesame Street
Sesame Street was not her only job at first, because she kept on substitute teaching. Pupils who had watched her on television before school were confused to find her in class that morning.
Q 18Which child actress played Susan, the girl raised not to believe in Santa Claus, in 1947's Miracle on 34th Street?
Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood was eight years old when she co-starred in the Christmas classic, having begun acting at four. It remained her best-known film as a child.
Q 19Which punk-era singer, born Susan Ballion in London, fronted the Banshees and later formed the Creatures?
Siouxsie Sioux
Siouxsie Sioux grew up in suburban Chislehurst, a place she later said inspired intense hatred. She was her band's vocalist and main lyricist.
Q 20Before L.A. Law, former model Susan Dey played teenager Laurie alongside David Cassidy in which 1970s sitcom?
The Partridge Family
The Partridge Family made her a teen star, yet co-star Shirley Jones wrote that Dey was the only cast member who consistently refused to take part in its reunions.
Chinese restaurants favour it for shared dishes such as Cantonese dim sum. Legend credits Thomas Jefferson with inventing it for a daughter, though he never had a lazy Susan at Monticello.
Q 24The Susan Constant was the largest of three ships that carried English colonists to found which Virginia settlement?
Jamestown
Jamestown was founded after she crossed the Atlantic with the smaller Godspeed and Discovery. Disney's Pocahontas shows the ship too, but under the wrong captain.
Q 25Susan Butcher became the first musher to win which Alaskan sled dog race four times in five years?
The Iditarod
The Iditarod had cost her dearly in 1985, when a moose killed two of her dogs and forced her to withdraw. She came back to win the very next race.
Q 26Which actress earned an Oscar nomination for playing New Yorker writer Susan Orlean in the 2002 film Adaptation?
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep's Orlean has a romance with an orchid poacher that the screenplay invented. The film grew out of Charlie Kaufman's struggle to adapt her book The Orchid Thief.
Q 27Susan Cain's 2012 bestseller Quiet argues that modern Western culture undervalues which kind of person?
Introverts
Introverts found a champion in Cain, a former Wall Street lawyer whose own difficulties with public speaking had made Harvard Law School a trial.
Q 28Susan Foreman, played by Carole Ann Ford, is the hero's granddaughter in which BBC science fiction series?
Doctor Who
Doctor Who made the pair relatives because writer Anthony Coburn felt an old man travelling the galaxy with a young girl for company looked not quite proper.
Q 29Susan Sontag's 1964 essay for the Partisan Review brought which aesthetic sensibility to mainstream attention?
Camp
Camp had hardly broken into print before then, Sontag wrote, apart from a two-page sketch in a Christopher Isherwood novel. The essay was her first major work.
Q 30Television writer Susan Harris created Soap and which Emmy-winning 1980s sitcom with Bea Arthur in a lead role?
The Golden Girls
The Golden Girls was her most financially successful show, although chronic fatigue syndrome limited how much she could take part in its production.