20 Famous People Who Were Refugees

Imagine a world without the work of physicist Albert Einstein, psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, painter Marc Chagall, author Joseph Conrad, filmmaker Billy Wilder or singer Freddie Mercury. Something they all had in common was that they had been refugees. Refugees have made their mark in all areas of society and have contributed to their adopted countries in many ways. For instance, both the 26th and 27th Governor General of Canada were refugees: Adrienne Clarkson was a toddler when her family fled the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in 1941 and Michaëlle Jean was 11 when she came to Canada in 1968, along with her mother and sister, to join their father, who had fled Haiti the year before. In celebration of World Refugee Day on June 20, here are some surprising famous people who were refugees too.

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Rita Ora

Known as much for her fashion fails as for her work as singer, actress and reality show host, Rita Ora was the first British female artist to have thirteen songs reach the top ten in the United Kingdom. She was born to Albanian parents in Kosovo, then still part of Yugoslavia. As Yugoslavia disintegrated and Albanians were persecuted, her family fled to the United Kingdom in 1991, when Rita was a baby.

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Mila Kunis

It’s no surprise that Mila Kunis is one of the most frugal celebrities when you hear that her family came to the United States with only $250. This was in 1991, when Mila was seven. Anti-Semitism was rife in what was then still Soviet Ukraine and the Kunis family were Jewish. Ukraine became an independent republic in August of that year but Mila, who couldn’t speak a word of English, started school in Los Angeles and got her first TV roles three years later.

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Regina Spektor

Singer and songwriter Regina Spektor was born to a very musical Russian-Jewish family in Moscow, then still the capital of the Soviet Union. In 1989, against the background of perestroika, her family considered staying for the sake of nine-year-old Regina’s piano studies but anti-Semitism moved them to travel to the United States as refugees. Regina practised on tabletops until she found a piano she could play in the basement of the local synagogue.

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K’naan

Refugees coming to Canada can get help from the Immigration and Refugee Board. If they’re coming from Somalia, they may also find a very famous voice speaking for them. Keinan Abdi Warsame had a happy childhood in Mogadishu even though his father had left to work as a New York taxi driver. Then civil war came to Somalia. It was when the 12-year-old boy nearly got blown up by a hand grenade that his mother decided that the family should join their father New York. After six months, they resettled in Toronto, where young Keinan learned English by listening to some of the world’s richest rappers and became K’naan.

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M.I.A.

M.I.A. — or Maya Arulpragasam — was born in London to Sri Lankan parents. When she was six months old, the family moved back to Sri Lanka, where her father became a Tamil activist. A few days after her ninth birthday, the Sri Lankan civil war started. The family had to hide from the army and for her own safety, young Maya had very little contact with her father: so much so that when her mother moved them to India, she would tell the children that the man who came to visit them was their uncle.

After resettling in Sri Lanka, the escalating war prompted Maya’s mother to move herself and the kids to London a week before the girl turned 11. Maya’s father became a mediator for peace in Sri Lanka.

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Gloria Estefan

Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine made Cuban rhythms immensely popular during the 1980s but the singer, today one of the world’s richest, didn’t grow up in the country where she was born. Her family fled to Miami in 1959, when Gloria was a toddler, to escape the Cuban Revolution. Her father, who had been a soldier in the army, returned to Cuba to participate in the Bay of Pigs Invasion but was captured by his cousin, a soldier in Fidel Castro’s army. He returned to Miami after nearly two years in captivity. Gloria went on to become the first Cuban American to receive a Kennedy Center Honors.

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Wyclef Jean

Many organizations help refugees to resettle in the United States but Haitian migrants have another champion for the causes that affect them: former Fugee Wyclef Jean. The Fugees got their name from a shortened form of “refugees”, which is sometimes used as a derogatory term for Haitian immigrants. Wyclef was nine when his family fled the Duvalier regime in Haiti and settled in the United States. After making it big, he started a foundation to give back to his country of birth, especially after an earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010. That year, he even tried to run for president of Haiti.

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Dr. Ruth Westheimer

Nobody is a better source for sex tips than Dr. Ruth, the American psychologist and TV talk show host. Dr. Ruth Westheimer was actually born Karola Ruth Siegel, to an Orthodox Jewish family in Germany. A week after Kristallnacht, the Nazis took ten-year-old Ruth’s father away. In January 1939, her mother and grandmother sent her to Switzerland as part of the Kindertransport that took Jewish children from Germany to safety. Ruth never saw her parents again: her father later died in Auschwitz and her mother was listed as “disappeared”. Ruth later moved to Mandatory Palestine, then France and then to the United States. In 2007 she regained German citizenship.

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Sylvester Groth

International audiences know Sylvester Groth mainly for his roles as Joseph Goebbels in Inglourious Basterds, a police investigator in Dark and as a Stasi agent in Deutschland 83. For the latter role he had real-life experience to draw on: in 1986, the award-winning East German actor escaped to the West while performing in Salzburg and was then followed and intimidated by the Stasi.

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Andy García

Actor Andy García was one of the biggest movie stars of the 1990s and more recently he appeared in Mamma Mia!, Here We Go Again and Book Club. He was born into a middle-class family in Cuba, where his mom was an English teacher and his dad an attorney and avocado farmer. After the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion when Andy was five, the family escaped Cuba for Miami, where they built up a very successful perfume company.

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Yusra Mardini

Yusra Mardini’s story captured the hearts of everyone watching the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she competed as a member of the Refugee Olympic Team. Four years before, she had represented her home country of Syria at the 2012 FNA World Swimming Championships.

However, when her house was destroyed in the Syrian civil war, she and her sister fled to Lebanon and then Turkey. They got onto a dinghy that would smuggle them to Greece but along the way, the engine stopped working and the craft started taking on water. Yusra, her sister and two other people got out and treaded water for more than three hours until the engine started working again and they made it to Lesbos. They then travelled to Berlin, where they settled in 2015.

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Alek Wek

With her impossibly long legs and amazing skin, Alek Wek took the fashion world by storm in 1995, shattering all existing ideals of beauty and becoming the first African model to make the cover of Elle. She was born in what is now South Sudan, sharing a two-bedroom house without running water and electricity with her parents and eight siblings.

Civil war broke out when Alek was eight and the family had to flee their home, avoiding capture by both rebel and government forces. All the walking caused an old injury of her father’s to become infected and he later died in Khartoum. Alek arrived in London when she was 14, was discovered at 18 and the rest is fashion history.

RELATED: These fashion designers are keeping up with the times.

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Isabel Allende

Author Isabel Allende was born into one of Chile’s most illustrious families and started her career with stints in journalism, translation and a job at the Food and Agricultural Organization that took her to Europe. In 1973 her family name became a curse when her father’s cousin, President Salvador Allende, died during a coup. Isabel arranged safe passage for people on the new regime’s "wanted" lists, until her name appeared on the lists too and she began receiving death threats. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote her debut novel, The House of the Spirits. She now lives in the United States and while she’s not one of the world’s richest authors, she’s one of the most widely read in Spanish.

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Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani was born to a Kurdish family in Iran. He became a journalist but the authorities did not look kindly upon his work to promote Kurdish identity. After a raid in which a number of his colleagues were arrested and imprisoned, Behrouz went into hiding and then fled first to Iraq and then to Indonesia.

On his way to Australia along with other asylum seekers, their boat was intercepted and Behrouz was held at the Manus Island detention centre. He secretly got the word out about human rights abuses at the centre — which led to its closure in 2017 – and wrote his memoir by sending it sentence by sentence over WhatsApp. He has since made it to New Zealand.

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Eugene Hütz

Gogol Bordello’s gypsy punk frontman and actor Eugene Hütz was born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of the Soviet Union. He was a teenager when his family fled their hometown in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. They embarked on a long journey that took them through Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy. In 1992, when Eugene was 20, they finally arrived as political refugees in the United States.

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Mikhail Baryshnikov

Born in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, Mikhail Baryshnikov became well-known ballet dancer in the Soviet Union. However, he wanted to work with the innovative choreographers of the West. His chance came in 1974, when he was on tour in Canada with the Bolshoi Ballet.

After the company’s final performance, Mikhail’s KGB handlers led him to the bus transporting the dancers but a crowd of fans appeared, wanting autographs. This allowed Mikhail to escape his handlers and dash to a waiting getaway car, political asylum and artistic freedom. After a stint with the Canadian National Ballet, he moved to the United States. He’s not only considered one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time but is also an acclaimed choreographer and actor.

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Sergey Brin

One of the world’s richest people, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born to Jewish parents in Moscow in what was then still the Soviet Union. When Sergey was five, his parents applied for an exit visa and were both fired from their jobs. It took eight months before they were allowed to leave the country, making their way to the United States via Vienna and Paris.

After resettlement in Maryland, Sergey’s father became a mathematics professor and helped the boy with his own math skills. Sergey graduated from university with honours in computer science and mathematics when he was only 19. He went on to Stanford, met Larry Page and the rest... well, Google it.

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Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright’s family had to flee her home country of Czechoslovakia not once, but twice. The first time was in 1938, when Madeleine – born Marie Jana Korbelová – was a year old and Hitler’s army was advancing. They settled in the United Kingdom and converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1941.

After the war, the family returned to Prague. In 1948, the Communist Party took over and Madeleine’s father, a staunch opponent of communism, took the family to the United States, where they were granted political asylum. Madeleine went on to become the first woman to serve as Secretary of State of the United States.

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Maryam Monsef

Canada’s Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Minister of Rural Economic Development knows a lot about the struggles refugees face. Her parents had fled the Soviet–Afghan War and Maryam Monsef was born in Iran. When she was a toddler, the family returned to Afghanistan but her father was killed on the border while traveling between the two countries and the rest of the family went back to Iran.

Even though they had legal status as "involuntary migrants", life was a struggle and when Maryam was nine, they returned to Afghanistan once again. Three years later her mother let the family embark on a long journey to Canada, where they settled in Peterborough.

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Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was born a prince of both Greece and Denmark. His father was Prince Andrew of Greece, where Philip was born during the Greco-Turkish War. At the end of the war, Philip’s uncle, King Constantine I, was forced to abdicate and Prince Andrew arrested before being banished from Greece. A British naval vessel evacuated the family, with baby Philip carried in a fruit box. They made their way to France, where a wealthy aunt lent them a home.

While Philip went on to marry into the wealthy British Royal Family, his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, later returned to Greece, where she worked for the Red Cross and hid a Jewish family during World War II.