I would have never gotten his first name!

1. I was born 1934 in London.

2. I'm one of those few people who obtained my Ph.D. at Cambridge (not an honorary one!) without having had even a Bachelor's degree first.

3. My work was so revolutionary at the time that one famous person said of it," "We must now redefine man..."

4. When I started in my work, my colleagues thought I had screwed up. I was using names instead of numbers.


5. There was an Institute named after me that helped me do my work. It got offended by a cartoon that mentioned me. I thought the cartoon was funny, and so I wrote a forward to one of that cartoonist's books.

6. Most girls in my era got a doll or teddy bear from their parents when they were young. Mine gave me a stuffed monkey and that made all the difference.

Dian Fossey?

Not Dian, but good guess.

7. I was the first of the Trimates, which included Dian.

8. Tanzania was my beat.

Jane Goodall?

You karnak, She Jane.

The scientists around her were scandalized because she gave the chimps she was observing names. Then because she actually took the time to watch, she discovered that chimps were tool makers and users--which meant that man could no longer be defined as the mammal that uses tools. There was a Gary Larsen cartoon where a chimp discovers a blonde hair on her mate's fur, and the caption was "So you've been with that hussy Jane Goodall again!" The Jane Goodall Institute took offense, but Jane thought it funny and wrote a forward for the next Larsen collection. The Trimates were Goodall, Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas, all proteges of anthropologist Louis Leaky.

Yes, I saw her in a live speaking engagement decades ago, and on many TV specials over the years on her field research in Gombe.

I was born in London in 1889.
My childhood in London was one of hardship and poverty.
I moved to America, and rose to fame as a comic actor and filmmaker during the era of silent movies.

Charlie Chaplin?

Chaplin it is! Your turn!

Wow! Chaplin seemed like a good guess, being one of the most famous actors of the era.

Here goes:
1. I was born in Kensington in 1874
2. I was baptized into the Church of England as a baby although my family was Unitarian
3. I attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator

4. I did not become an artist, but rather a writer.
5. I am best known for my visual and paradoxical style of writing and have often been referred to as the "prince of paradox."

Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan

Nope, not Gilbert.

6. My wife led me back to Anglicanism, but I ultimately converted to Catholicism in 1922.
7. I had the habit of being absent-minded and often had to telegraph my wife to figure out where I was supposed to be.

HG Wells?

Albert Einstein?

Fred MacMurray?

Unfortunately, none of them.

7. My most famous fictional character is a priest who solves mysteries
8. I was friends with George Bernard Shaw even though we often debated over philosophy and religion
9. I was very large, and P.G. Wodehouse described a large crash as "a sound like [me] falling onto a sheet of tin"