Maintenance
Actors with April birthdays: why the calendar gives no dates
Actors with April birthdays appear on this calendar by month, never by date. Here is why a birth date is a compliance input kept in paperwork, not on a page.
On a working set, a date of birth is not trivia. It sets how many hours a young performer may work, who must be present, what schooling happens, and which permissions a production needs before filming.
The people who need that number look it up in a register, not on a fan page.
This calendar groups performers by the month their birthday falls in: actors with April birthdays, actors with January birthdays, and so on. The exact date of birth stays where the working paperwork puts it.
Actors with April birthdays on this calendar
The April group is one of the fullest on this site. Among the actors it lists are Emma Watson, Robert Downey Jr., Kristen Stewart, Emma Thompson, Saoirse Ronan, Kate Hudson, America Ferrera, Michael Fassbender, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Pedro Pascal, Gal Gadot, Uma Thurman, Penélope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Renée Zellweger, Claire Danes, Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Daniel Day-Lewis, Barbra Streisand and Al Pacino.
Each of those names sits under its month and nothing else. What the calendar carries about them is the name, the month and the work, which is the point of the rest of this page.
What to take away
- A birth date in a working context is a legal input, checked against a document, used and then left where it was found.
- The threshold it is checked against is set by jurisdiction and changes from place to place, so a number quoted with no jurisdiction is meaningless.
- Everything a public directory could usefully say about a performer can be said without the date, because the entities that need it have their own access to it.
Why the date exists in the paperwork
The concept doing the work is the age of majority, when a person is treated as an adult for legal purposes. It is not one number or one concept.
Different bodies set different thresholds for different activities. The age at which one thing becomes permitted is not the age at which another does.
In the United States, these rules are state law rather than federal. California, for example, sets limits for young performers in its labor code and requires an entertainment work permit, issued by the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement.
A production has to satisfy the rules that apply where it is filming, which may not be where anyone involved lives. Underneath the threshold sits the record. Civil registration is the system by which births are recorded by the state, and it is the source a production or a regulator checks against.
In the United States, that record is the birth certificate, held by the vital records office of the state or county where the birth took place.
Access to it is controlled: a person can obtain their own record and specified others can obtain it for defined purposes, and a broadcaster's research department is not one of them.
Three different questions that get confused
Three different questions
Who asks it
- May this person work these hours
- A production, a regulator
- Is this person old enough for this role
- A casting decision
- How old is this person
- A reader
What it is answered from
- May this person work these hours
- A document, checked once
- Is this person old enough for this role
- A judgment about performance, not a record
- How old is this person
- Nothing that anyone is owed
The first is a compliance question with a defined answer and a defined source. The second is an artistic question that the February actors page works through under the heading of playing age, and it has never depended on the real number. The third has no legitimate mechanism behind it, which is why it is answered by copying between websites.
What a directory can carry instead
- The period an output spans, which is documented by the works themselves.
- Whether a performer is currently working, which is documented by recent credits.
- The kind of material they have appeared in, which is what most readers are actually looking for.
- Whether a performer was a minor at the time of a particular production, which is sometimes public because the production said so, and which is a much narrower statement than a date.
- A route to a correction, described in the April index and set out in full on the January index.
None of that needs a date and none of it goes stale in the way a stated age does.
What a directory can carry
- The period an output spans
- Whether a performer is currently working
- The kind of material they appeared in
- Whether they were a minor then
- A route to a correction
The rule this site follows
No entry gives a date of birth, an age or a place of birth. The reasoning is not that the information is uninteresting.
A public date of birth acts as an identifier in systems never designed for it to be public. The February index sets out that argument in detail. Parties with a legitimate need already have a better source than any web page.
Where a legal question genuinely arises, the answer comes from the relevant authority for the jurisdiction the work is happening in, and from a lawyer where anything consequential turns on it. A calendar page is not a substitute for either, and any page that offers a threshold as a fact is offering something it cannot know.
Common questions
Does a production need a performer's age or their date of birth?
It needs whatever the applicable rules specify, verified against an acceptable document. That is a defined procedure with a defined source, and it happens once rather than being carried around.
Why not publish the date if a regulator has already seen it?
Because a regulator seeing a document under a legal purpose is not publication, and treating it as such would make every controlled record public by implication. Access for a purpose is the whole design.
Can a page say a performer was a child actor?
It can say that a performer appeared in productions as a minor where that is a matter of public record from the production itself. That is a statement about work rather than about a person's details, and it does not require or imply a date.
Where should a reader go for the actual rules?
To the body that regulates work by minors in the relevant place, which varies, and to professional advice where anything turns on it. Naming a threshold here would be inventing one, and the rules differ enough that a wrong number would be worse than none.
