Following the death of French icon Brigitte Bardot this week , at age 91, only three individuals named in Billy Joel's 1989 hit "We Didn't Start the Fire" remain alive.
The survivors are:
- Bob Dylan (born 1941, age 84), the legendary musician and Nobel laureate;
- Chubby Checker (born 1941, age 84), known for popularizing the Twist dance craze;
- Bernie Goetz (born 1937, age 88), infamous for the 1984 New York subway shooting incident.
Those also listed in the song include: Harry Truman, Doris Day, singer Johnnie Ray, columnist Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, Soviet spies the Rosenbergs, Sugar Ray Robinson, Marlon Brando, Dwight Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth II, boxer Rocky Marciano, Liberace, philosopher George Santayana, Joseph Stalin, Soviet Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov, former Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser, Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, Winthrop Rockefeller, baseball player Roy Campanella, Roy Cohn, former President of Argentina Juan Peron, Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, Albert Einstein, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev, Princess Grace, Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Jack Kerouac, former Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai, former French President Charles de Gaulle, murderer Charles Starkweather, Buddy Holly, mafioso Vito Genovese, Fidel Castro, first South Korean President Syngman Rhee, John F. Kennedy, Chubby Checker, Ernest Hemingway, Nazi Adolf Eichman, Bob Dylan, John Glenn, Pope Paul VI, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Ronald Reagan, former Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini, Sally Ride and Goetz.
The song, a rapid-fire list of historical headlines and figures from 1949 (Joel's birth year) to 1989, references 59 notable people, including Bardot as a 1950s-1960s sex symbol.
Bardot, famed for films like ...And God Created Woman (1956) and La Vérité (1960), retired from acting in 1973 to focus on animal rights activism. Her foundation announced her passing, emphasizing her lifelong dedication to animal welfare.
The song's origins stem from Joel, then turning 40, countering a young friend's claim that the 1950s were boring by rattling off decades of events and figures, creating what he described as a symmetrical chronicle.
Bardot's death further underscores the song's enduring legacy as a cultural time capsule of mid-20th-century history.