1942 births

Michel Creton (17 August 1942 in Wassy, Haute-Marne, France) is a French actor.
He came to international attention with the release of Un homme de trop (Shock Troops) by Costa Gavras in 1967. Since then, he played in many films, appeared on TV and on stage (for example in 1989 in Un fil à la patte de Georges Feydeau in Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris). While he was in cinema a supporting actor, as one of Bernard Fresson's friends in Max an the junkmen, and mostly rare in major roles like his thief in Nicholas Gessner's Le tuer triste, he was a leading man on TV: alongside to Claude Jade in Fou comme François. For his second TV movie with Claude Jade, Treize, he was the writer of the screenplay.

François Gérard Marie Léotard (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa ʒeʁaʁ maʁi leɔtaʁ]; 26 March 1942 – 25 April 2023) was a French politician. Singer and actor Philippe Léotard was his brother.
A member of the Republican Party, the liberal-conservative component of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), he appeared in the foreground of the political scene in the 1980s. He led a new generation of right-wing politicians, the "renovationmen", who opposed the old right-wing leaders Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
In 1981, he was selected to be one of the first Young Leaders of the French-American Foundation. His political career started with being elected as the mayor of Fréjus in 1977. He served two terms as the deputy of Var.As culture minister from 1986 to 1988, he sold the main public TV channel TF1. He returned to the French cabinet as defense minister, from 1993 to 1995. Supporting the candidacy of Edouard Balladur in the 1995 presidential election, he was dismissed after Chirac's election. Elected president of the UDF in 1996, he could not prevent the split of this confederation two years later with Alain Madelin's secession. This and the party's poor showing in the 1998 regional elections prompted his resignation. After a mission in Macedonia in 2001 as representative of the European Union, he retired from politics. In 2003, he created together with other prominent European personalities the Medbridge Strategy Center, whose goal is to promote dialogue and mutual understanding between Europe and the Middle East. He later authored several books.
Léotard died in Fréjus on 25 April 2023, at age 81.

Leona Maria Detiège (born Antwerp, 26 November 1942) is a Belgian politician.Detiège was a member of the Belgian Socialist Party and is till member of its successor Flemish social-democratic party. Until 2014, she was a federal senator, succeeding Marleen Temmerman in October 2012. From 1995 till 2003 she was Mayor of Antwerp.
Detiège was born in Antwerp. Her father, Frans Detiège, had also served as Mayor of Antwerp, while her daughter, Maya Detiège, served as a federal representative.

Günter Wallraff (born 1 October 1942) is a German writer and undercover journalist.

Roland Lethem (born 1942) is a Belgian filmmaker and writer.
Influenced at his beginnings by Buñuel, Cocteau, the surrealists and by the Japanese cinema (Seijun Suzuki, Ishirō Honda, Kōji Wakamatsu, Yoko Ono), stunned by the Festival of the film expérimental of Knokke in 1967 and by May 1968, Roland Lethem wants to push the people to look at the things of which they say they are freed, it's to say to place them in front of their responsibilities. Even if sometimes the results leaves much to be desired, the idea of each one of his films is seductive and exemplary. A fact is
certain, his films are disturbing, they are sometimes unpleasant to look at. The narcissistic and provocative play of the debuts turned itself into direct, visual, and verbal insult, and in slandering. His dream was one moment to be able to film the intimate life of the pope or the sexual plays of the Belgian sovereigns. Through violence, pornography and cruelty of some scenes, Roland Lethem is a gentle, generous man with of a lot of humour. The work of Roland Lethem evolves, becomes political, ecological. La Ballade des amants maudits (The Ballad of the cursed lovers, 1966) or La Fée sanguinaire (The Bloodthirsty Fairy, 1968) still tell stories. Les Souffrances d'un oeuf meurtri (The Sufferings of a ravaged Egg, 1967), poem of love in several parts (Étoiles/Stars, Corps/Bodies, Hymen/Marriage or Hymen (ambiguous in French), Oeuf/Egg) dedicated to all who conceive and to all who are conceived, irresistibly makes you think at the Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye, 1928) of Georges Bataille.
Some of the titles of his films include Le Saigneur est avec nous and Le sexe enragé. There are several thorough studies published on his films (Cinema/London, Skoop/Amsterdam) and
Bandes de cons! (Bunch of Assholes!, 1970), his most famous film, was the subject of a seminar at the University of Amsterdam.
He frequently collaborated with Jean-Pierre Bouyxou and Jio Berk.

William Procter Matthews III (November 11, 1942 – November 12, 1997) was an American poet and essayist.

Chantal de Guerre (French pronunciation: [ʃɑ̃tal də ɡɛʁ]; born 10 June 1942), known as Chantal Goya ([ɡɔja]), is a French singer and actress.
Goya started her career as a yé-yé girl, singing a catchy mid-1960s hybrid of girl-group pop and French chanson. She also enjoyed a career as a French New Wave actress; she had a starring role as Madeleine in the 1966 Jean-Luc Godard film Masculin, féminin and in Jean-Daniel Pollet's L'amour c'est gai, l'amour c'est triste (Love is joy, love is sad).
Since 1975, she has become mostly known as a singer for children. Together with her husband, songwriter and composer Jean-Jacques Debout, and with a talented team of designers and costume people, she does shows for and with children. The main themes are dreams and traveling. Her usual character is Marie-Rose, a mix between a maid and an older sister (reminiscent of Julie Andrews in both The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins).

Morag Hood (12 December 1942 – 5 October 2002) was a British actress who featured in numerous television programmes, stage productions, and audio presentations in the UK from the 1960s up to the late 1990s.

John J. Donovan (born February 12, 1942) is a former management professor at MIT, and the former president and chief executive of the Cambridge Technology Group, an executive training company. On May 3, 2022, Donovan Sr. was convicted of a dozen felony counts of fraud and forgery in a jury trial, for attempting to steal assets from his son's widow and children.

Thomas Francis Reilly (born February 14, 1942) is an American attorney and politician who served as the 45th Massachusetts Attorney General. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Irish immigrant parents.
He was one of three candidates who sought the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts in the 2006 election. Former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Deval Patrick won the party's nomination and the general election, defeating Reilly and businessman Chris Gabrieli.