40

Previously a figure skater, Vera Wang went on to make a name for herself in fashion at the age of 40.

Martha Stewart didn’t gain fame until her 40s, when she began to write multiple books and then host long-running TV shows.

Jane Lynch was 43 when she had her first role in Christopher Guest’s 2000 mockumentary Best in Show, and later gained even more fame after her role in The 40 Year Old Virgin at the age of 45.

Connie Britton had minor roles in TV and film over the years, but struck it big on TV’s Friday Night Lights at 40

Before directing hit movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain in his early 40’s, Ang Lee was stay-at-home dad.

Steve Carell was 43 when he landed his big lead role in The Office.

Kathy Bates got her big breakout role as psycho fan Anne Wilkes in Misery when she was 42.

Bryan Cranston Before he was Walter White, he was Malcom’s dad Hal. Even though he’s had two long-running successful series, Cranston was 44 when he premiered in Malcom in the Middle.

Ricky Gervais
This British comedian is best known for the original iteration of The Office, which didn’t premier until Gervais was 40.

Bob Ross
Ross, known for his gentle voice and brushstrokes on his TV program The Joy of Painting, didn’t become a household name until well after he left the Air Force to paint his happy little trees.

Rodney Dangerfield
When he was 46, this legendary comedian earned fame when he stepped in as a last-minute replacement on The Ed Sullivan Show

Lucille Ball
Even though she was signed with MGM, she never reached fame until I Love Lucy premiered at age 40.

Toni Morrison may be a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, but she was also a late bloomer. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, wasn’t published until she was 40, while she was working at Random House as an editor. The Bluest Eye marked the beginning of a remarkable literary career that has included iconic titles like Beloved and Song of Solomon, all happening in tandem with an academic career as a Princeton professor.

Helen DeWitt published ‘The Last Sumarai’ at 41.
DeWitt was 41 when she finally published her first novel, The Last Samurai. In a fascinating interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, DeWitt discusses her path to publication which includes a suicide attempt, years in academia at Oxford and then a turn toward the literary world. At one point with hundreds of fragments of abandoned and half-begun books on her computer, she quit her job and spent a month writing a new book, which would become The Last Samurai. After finding early interest, she felt pulled in too many directions and took time off from it before finally finishing and publishing the beloved story.

George Eliot didn’t publish ‘Middlemarch’ until she was 52. Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, is one of Victorian England’s most acclaimed novelists. Her first book, Adam Bede, was published when she was 40, and her seminal Middlemarch didn’t come out for another 12 years. She chose the male pen name so that her novels and words would be taken seriously at a time when female writers were associated with romance.

James Michener wrote plenty before Tales of the South Pacific, his debut novel at age 40, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948. At the University of Northern Colorado in the 1930s he wrote articles that only a social scientist with Keats running around in his head could write.

1979

McDonald’s Happy Meal

ESPN is launched.