Some famous Leos and personalities born under the sign of Leo

Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon I, known as Napoleon Bonaparte before he became emperor, was probably the most brilliant military figure in history. Rising to command of the French Revolutionary armies, he seized political power as first consul in 1799 and proclaimed himself emperor in 1804. By repeated victories over various European coalitions, he extended French rule over much of Europe. He was finally defeated in 1814-15. Napoleon was born on August 15, 1769, and after numerous political upheavals in France, died in exile on the island of Saint Helena on May 5, 1821.

Lord Alfred Tennyson
The pre-eminent English poet of his time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, August 6, 1809, and died October 6, 1892, began writing poetry as a child and, with two of his brothers, Frederick and Charles, published a volume of poems before he entered Cambridge University in 1828. There he formed a close friendship with Arthur Hallam, whose death, combined with the poor reception of his own Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, plunged Tennyson into a decade-long depression during which he wrote much but published little. Re-emerging as a mature poet in 1842 with a two-volume collection of new and revised poems that included "Locksley Hall," "Ulysses," "Morte d'Arthur," "Mariana," and "The Lady of Shalott," he then established his eminence with In Memoriam, his elegy for Hallam. Later the same year he was named poet laureate, and in 1859 he began publishing his version of a national epic in 'Idylls of the King', retellings of Arthurian legends.

Henry Ford
Widely credited for advancing the automotive industry, Henry Ford began to experiment with a horseless carriage about 1890 and completed his first car, the quadricycle, in 1896. It was the sixth American-built gasoline-powered car. During the following years he tried unsuccessfully to get it into production. During this period he built racing cars and became a well-known racing driver. In 1903 he launched the Ford Motor Company with a capital of $100,000, of which $28,000 was in cash. By this time he had formulated his ideal of production: "The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike..."

Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping, born in Sichuan province, 1904, is one of the towering figures of the Chinese Communist party (CCP). He joined the Communist Youth League in 1922 and the CCP in 1924 and studied in France and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. A veteran of the Long March, Deng was a senior political officer in the Red Army from 1927 to 1949 and became a member of the party Central Committee in 1945. From 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, Deng was among the most senior officials in southwest China. In 1952 he was transferred to Beijing, where he advanced to become a vice-premier of the State Council, a politburo member, and party general secretary and served as a key negotiator in the troubled relationship with the USSR. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, however, Deng was denounced as a "capitalist roader" and dismissed from all his posts. He returned to a top political role in 1973, was again purged in 1976, and was brought back to senior government, party, and military posts in mid-1977, after the death of Mao Zedong.

Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro Ruz, Cuba's enduring "maximum leader," has held power since 1959. He is president, first secretary of the Cuban Communist party, and commander of the armed forces. His decisions are final on matters of domestic and foreign policy. Castro was born on August 13, 1926, on a farm in Mayari municipality in the province of Oriente. He attended good Catholic schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana, where he took to the spartan regime at a Jesuit boarding school, Colegio de Belen. In 1945 he enrolled at the University of Havana, graduating in 1950 with a law degree. He married Mirta Diaz-Balart in 1948, but they were divorced in 1954. Their son, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, born in 1949, has served as head of Cuba's atomic energy commission. A member of the social-democratic Ortodoxo party in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Castro was an early and vocal opponent of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. On July 26, 1953, Castro led an attack on the Moncada army barracks that failed but brought him national prominence. At the time, his political ideas were nationalist, anti-imperialist, and reformist; he was not a member of the Communist party.