Updated October 2026. Bios checked against Britannica, the Nobel Prize, the Booker Prizes, Olympedia, Team Ireland, the BBC, Queen’s University Belfast, CERN and Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council.
For a small place, Belfast and Northern Ireland have produced an extraordinary number of world-famous people. There are Oscar winners, Nobel laureates, sporting greats and the man who gave his name to a temperature scale. Here are the famous faces with roots in Belfast and across Northern Ireland, grouped so you can jump to the bit you care about. Where someone was born outside Belfast, we’ve said so.
Famous actors from Belfast and Northern Ireland
Kenneth Branagh
Born: 10 December 1960, Belfast. Best known for his film versions of Shakespeare, Branagh moved with his family to London when he was nine. With his film Belfast, he became the first person to be nominated for Oscars in seven different categories, and he won the Academy Award for its screenplay.
Liam Neeson
Born: 7 June 1952, Ballymena, County Antrim. One of Northern Ireland’s biggest Hollywood names, Neeson earned an Oscar nomination for best actor for Schindler’s List (1993).
Stephen Rea
Born: 31 October 1946, Belfast. A stage and screen actor with a long career, Rea is perhaps best known internationally for Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992).
Jamie Dornan
Born: Holywood, County Down. Dornan grew up in the Belfast suburbs and went to Methodist College in south Belfast. He found international fame with Fifty Shades of Grey and the Belfast-set BBC drama The Fall. He also played the father in Branagh’s Belfast, a part based on Branagh’s own dad.
Famous musicians from Belfast
Van Morrison
Born: 31 August 1945, Belfast. From the band Them to “Brown Eyed Girl” (1967), Astral Weeks and Moondance (1970), Van the Man is one of Belfast’s most celebrated exports. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 and knighted in 2015.
Ruby Murray
Born: 29 March 1935, Belfast. One of the most successful stars in British pop history, Murray set a chart record in 1955 by having five hits in the Top Twenty at the same time. The BBC notes that only Elvis Presley and Madonna have equalled it.
Sir James Galway
Born: 8 December 1939, Belfast. One of the world’s best-known flautists, Galway became principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1969, then went solo in 1975. He was knighted in 2001.
Gary Moore
Born: Belfast, in the same part of the city as Van Morrison. The guitarist moved to Dublin at 16, played with Skid Row and later Thin Lizzy, and built a career spanning five decades. He died in 2011, aged 58.
Famous sports stars from Belfast and Northern Ireland
George Best
Born: 22 May 1946, Belfast. Died: 2005. Arguably the greatest footballer these islands have produced, Best was European Footballer of the Year in 1968. He helped Manchester United become the first English club to win the European Cup, and he scored 178 goals in 466 games for the club. Belfast’s city airport now carries his name.
Alex “Hurricane” Higgins
From: Belfast. The Belfast man won snooker’s world title twice, in 1972 and 1982, and his fast, flamboyant style made him one of the game’s most famous characters.
Rory McIlroy
Born: 4 May 1989, Holywood, County Down. McIlroy has won six majors: the 2011 US Open, the 2012 and 2014 PGA Championships, the 2014 Open and the Masters in 2025 and 2026. His 2025 Masters win completed the career Grand Slam, and in 2026 he became only the fourth golfer to win back-to-back Masters.
Dame Mary Peters
Born: 6 July 1939, Halewood, England. English-born but a Northern Ireland sporting icon, Peters spent much of her life here, and her first pentathlon was in Ballymena in 1955. She won Olympic pentathlon gold in Munich in 1972 with a world record, and Commonwealth gold in 1970.
Joey Dunlop
Born: 25 February 1952, near Ballymoney, County Antrim. The “King of the Roads” won a staggering 26 Isle of Man TT races and 13 North West 200s, plus five world championships. He died racing in Estonia in 2000.
Rhys McClenaghan
From: Newtownards, County Down. McClenaghan won pommel horse gold at the Paris 2024 Olympics, Ireland’s first Olympic medal in gymnastics. Back in 2019 he became the first Irish gymnast to win a World Championship medal.
Famous writers from Belfast and Northern Ireland
C.S. Lewis
Born: 29 November 1898, Belfast. Died: 1963, Oxford. The author of the seven Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters held posts at both Oxford and Cambridge.
Seamus Heaney
Born: 13 April 1939, near Castledawson, County Londonderry. Died: 2013, Dublin. Heaney studied at Queen’s University Belfast and lectured there at the end of the 1960s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth”.
Louis MacNeice
Born: 12 September 1907, Belfast. Died: 1963. One of the great 1930s poets alongside W.H. Auden, with whom he wrote Letters from Iceland.
Brian Moore
Born: 25 August 1921, Belfast. Died: 1999, Malibu. The novelist made his name with The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955).
Anna Burns
Born: 7 March 1962, Belfast. Burns won the 2018 Booker Prize for Milkman, which also won the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
Famous people in history, politics and science
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson)
Born: 26 June 1824, Belfast. Died: 1907. The physicist behind the absolute temperature scale, which is why temperatures in science are measured in kelvins. He also made key contributions to thermodynamics and to transatlantic telegraph cables.
John Stewart Bell
The Queen’s University Belfast graduate (1948 and 1949) went on to work at CERN. In 1964 he published the paper behind “Bell’s theorem”, a landmark in quantum physics.
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
The Northern Irish astrophysicist discovered pulsars in 1967 while working as a research assistant at Cambridge, one of the great astronomical discoveries of the 20th century.
Professor Frank Pantridge
Born: near Hillsborough, County Down. Known as the father of emergency medicine, Pantridge put the first portable defibrillator into a Belfast ambulance in 1965. It weighed 70kg and ran on car batteries. By 1968 he had designed a version weighing just 3kg. Defibrillators now hang on walls around the world.
Mary McAleese
Born: 27 June 1951, Belfast. McAleese was President of Ireland from 1997 to 2011, the country’s second female president and the first from Northern Ireland.
Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan
Betty Williams (born 22 May 1943, Belfast; died 2020) co-founded the Peace People with Mairead Corrigan. The pair were awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize “for the courageous efforts in founding a movement to put an end to the violent conflict in Northern Ireland”.
John Hume and David Trimble
John Hume (born 1937, Derry~Londonderry; died 2020) led the SDLP from 1979 to 2001. David Trimble (born 15 October 1944, Belfast; died 2022) led the Ulster Unionist Party and was Northern Ireland’s First Minister from 1998 to 2002. They shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland”.
Where can I see Belfast’s famous names around the city?
You’ll bump into plenty of them as you explore. You’ll land at George Best Belfast City Airport. Seamus Heaney and John Stewart Bell both studied at Queen’s University, and the stories of the Troubles and the peace process are told at the Ulster Museum. For more, see our Belfast history guide and best things to do in Belfast.
Frequently asked questions
Who is the most famous person from Belfast?
It’s a pub debate with no right answer, but George Best, C.S. Lewis, Van Morrison and Kenneth Branagh are always in the running.
Is Liam Neeson from Belfast?
Not quite. Liam Neeson was born in Ballymena, County Antrim.
Was Seamus Heaney from Belfast?
No. He was born near Castledawson in County Londonderry, but he studied and lectured at Queen’s University Belfast.
Which famous people from Northern Ireland have won a Nobel Prize?
Seamus Heaney (Literature, 1995), Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan (Peace, 1976), and John Hume and David Trimble (Peace, 1998).
Is Rory McIlroy from Belfast?
He was born in Holywood, County Down, just outside Belfast.
Related guides
- Is Belfast in the UK or Ireland?
- First-time visitor guide to Belfast
- Belfast’s top Googled questions, answered
- Titanic: the ship, the sinking and its legacy
Discover more from LoveBelfast
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
