Home / Birthday profiles / Will Hay

Birthday profile

Will Hay

Will Hay, English actor, director, and screenwriter (died 1949)

Find birthday twinsOpen interactive profile
Born
December 6, 1888
Died
April 18, 1949
Zodiac sign
Sagittarius
Birth year
1888

About Will Hay

William Thomson Hay (6 December 1888 – 18 April 1949) was an English comedian best known for playing authority figures with comic failings in several films, most notably as a schoolmaster. His film Oh, Mr Porter! (1937), made by Gainsborough Pictures, is often cited as the supreme British-produced film-comedy, and in 1938 he was the third highest-grossing star in the UK. Many comedians have acknowledged him as a major influence. Hay was also a keen amateur astronomer.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

Will Hay timeline

  1. Born: December 6, 1888
  2. Died: April 18, 1949

The world when Will Hay was born

Will Hay was born in 1888. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlineGreat Blizzard of 1888 paralyzes US East Coast
  • Technology milestoneKodak box camera — "You press the button, we do the rest"
  • Defining fadKodak camera craze
  • World population~1.48B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderGrover Cleveland
  • U.S. population57.6M

1888 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Will Hay's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18882026
Population57.6M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, IMDb, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.