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A nepo baby, or nepotism baby, is a famous or notable figure descended from another famous person or affluent family of some kind. In this episode of List Show, host Erin McCarthy lists 18 nepo babies from history, from Charlie Chaplin to Pericles. 00:00 Oscar Wilde 00:55 Intro 01:47 Charlie Chaplin 02:38 Jean Renoir 03:07 George H.W. Bush 03:55 John Quincy Adams 04:27 Benjamin Harrison 04:45 Pericles 05:17 Leo Tolstoy 05:55 Charles Darwin 06:48 Ludwig van Beethoven 07:31 Mary Shelley 08:19 Martin Amis 08:49 Virginia Woolf 09:06 T.S. Eliot 09:13 Emily Dickinson 09:19 Ursula K. Le Guin 09:28 Irène Joliot-Curie 09:58 Louis Zborowski About Mental Floss: Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more. Follow Mental Floss: Website: https://www.mentalfloss.com/ Mental Floss Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine Mental Floss Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mental_floss/ Mental Floss TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mental_floss Mental Floss X: https://twitter.com/mental_floss Mental Floss Discord: https://discord.io/mentalfloss Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided. 2025 Mental Floss 18 Nepo Babies From History | Mental Floss https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss
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Did you know that Oscar Wilde was a Nepo baby? His mother was Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee
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a poet who wrote for the Irish nationalist newspaper The Nation under the pseudonym
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Speranza, meaning hope in Italian. In 1848, one of her pieces actually prompted the government to
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shut down the publication on grounds of sedition. When Oscar's own literary star was on the rise a
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few decades later, some people still just called him Speranza's son. Oscar's dad was no slacker
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either. William Wylde was mid-19th century Ireland's most famous ophthalmic surgeon, which might be the most niche claim to fame in history, but hey, it's something. He also edited
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a scientific journal and published some of his own writings. In Oscar's 1897 long-form letter
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De Profundus, he wrote that his parents had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and
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honored, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own
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country, in its evolution as a nation. Big, big shoes. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, Editor-in-Chief of MentalFloss.com
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These days, the term NepoBaby, short for Nepotism Baby, is most often levied against a famous
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entertainer descended from another famous entertainer or affluent family of some kind
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Like Dakota Johnson, whose parents are Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. Or Law & Order legend
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Mariska Hargitay, whose mom was blonde bombshell Jane Mansfield. More loosely, though, a Nepo
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baby could be anyone whose forebears paved the way for their own success, whether via
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helpful connections in a given industry, or just because familial wealth freed them up
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to pursue their passions. On this episode of The List Show, we're covering a handful of historical figures who you might
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not have realized were Nepo babies, from actors like Charlie Chaplin to ancient politicians
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like Pericles. Let's get started. Charlie Chaplin is such a household name that you probably assumed he was the origin point of his own Nepo Baby chain
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His kids include the actor Geraldine Chaplin, who is also descended from Eugene O'Neill
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and her kids include Una Chaplin, whom Game of Thrones fans know best as Lady Talisa, wife of Robb Stark
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But Charlie Chaplin's backstory has notes of nepotism in it too. His parents, Charles Chaplin Sr. and Hannah Chaplin, stage name Lily Harley, were both comic performers in 19th century British musical halls
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Charlie Jr. got his stage start at age nine in a traveling clogging troupe called The Eight Lancashire Lads
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Too bad reality TV didn't exist back then because I just know clogger dads would have made dance moms look tame
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The whole thing was Charlie Sr.'s idea. He knew the troupe's manager and was probably trying to get his son a paying job so he wouldn't be on the hook for child support payments
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Famed French impressionist Pierre Renoir fostered the filmmaking career of his son Jean Renoir in a different way In 1924 Jean financed his first movie Catherine or Une Vie Sans Joye by selling some paintings by his father who had died five years prior Many a film buff
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considers Jean Renoir just as talented as his dad. His 1939 film La Regle de Joux
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or The Rules of the Game, came in 13th on Sight & Sound's 2022 list of the greatest films of all
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time. Jumping over to politics, George H.W. Bush wasn't the patriarch of the Bush political dynasty
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His father, Prescott Bush, was a Republican senator for Connecticut from 1952 to 1963
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Prescott's dad, Samuel Prescott Bush, was a wealthy Ohio industrialist who served on the
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federal government's War Industries Board during World War I. Two of George H.W.'s kids
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former President George W. Bush and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, have stretched the
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family's political legacy to four generations, if you count Samuel's government work. Jeb's son
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George P. Bush is doing his best to keep it going. He was the Texas Land Commissioner from 2015 to
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2023 and formed a political action committee in May 2023. I have to assume the P in George P. Bush
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stands for politics. Oh, no, wait, it's Prescott. Somebody buy the Bushes of Baby Name book
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George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are one of just two father-son presidential pairs in U.S
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history. The other duo is John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. Historian David McCullough told
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Washington Post in 2000 that John Adams saw the rise of his son with nothing but pleasure
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Although he worried about the strain of the presidency on him, it seems pretty apparent
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he saw his son as redeeming his defeat. The elder Adams had lost his re-election campaign in 1800 to
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Thomas Jefferson. Ah, fathers using their sons as a way to redeem their own failures. That's always
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healthy. While we're on the topic of U.S. presidents, let's talk about the Harrisons
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Benjamin Harrison held the office from 1889 to 1893. Not only was he the son of a congressman
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but he was also the grandson of a president, William Henry Harrison, and the great-grandson
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of Benjamin Harrison V, who signed the Declaration of Independence. Politics ran in Pericles' family
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too. The ancient Greek statesman is generally credited with kick-starting the Golden Age of
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Athens in the 5th century BCE. During his tenure as the de facto head of Athens' Democratic Assembly
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the city became Greece's cultural and political epicenter. Building the Parthenon, for example
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was Pericles' idea. But without his parents' pedigree, he wouldn't have had the power or
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money to get into governing in the first place. His mother, Agoriste, was a member of the extremely
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influential and wealthy Alcmionid family, and his father was a wealthy politician named Xanthippus
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Leo Tolstoy also came from a long line of nobles. The Anna Karenina author was a count
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descended from Peter Andreevich Tolstoy, who had been made a count back in 1724
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As historian Harlow Robinson wrote in 1983, To be born a Tolstoy was to enter one of the most celebrated talented and resilient families in Russian history and to take one place in a line of artists writers diplomats scoundrels and eccentrics that stretched back to the 14th century
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Few families in any country have succeeded, century after century, in maintaining such a
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preeminent position in political, artistic, and social life. The Kardashians work hard, but the
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Tolstoy's work harder. Charles Darwin wasn't the first scientific smarty in the Darwin family
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His paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a poet, physician, botanist, and naturalist who wrote
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a theory of evolution in his 1794 book Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life. In Charles's autobiography
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written in 1876, he gave his grandfather a backwards hat tip of source for inspiring him
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to study evolution. I had previously read The Zoonomia of My Grandfather, but without producing
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any effect on me. Nevertheless, it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views
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maintained and praised may have favored my upholding them under a different form in my
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origin of species. At this time, I admired greatly the Zoonomia, but on reading it a second time
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after an interval of 10 or 15 years, I was much disappointed. The proportion of speculation being
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so large to the facts given. Now you see why I called it a backwards hat tip. Old Erasmus isn't
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the only grandparent to be hugely eclipsed in the history books by their grandkid. When you say the
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name Ludwig van Beethoven. Nobody asks which one. But the composer's grandfather was also named
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Ludwig van Beethoven, and he too was a musician. Ludwig the Elder was born in Flanders, modern
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Belgium, and made his debut as a church choir singer at age five. He learned to play the organ
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and bounced around various churches as a choir director or singer before moving to Bonn in modern
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Germany, where he became the court's official music director in 1761. Though Beethoven was just
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a few years old when his grandfather died, he held him in very high esteem his whole life
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as evidenced by the portrait of Ludwig the Elder that always hung in Beethoven's house
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If I tried to list all the writers whose parents were also writers, I'd be sitting here longer than
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it takes to actually write a book. But here's a quick highlight reel. Mary Shelley, author of
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Frankenstein, was the daughter of a philosophy power couple. Mary Wollstonecraft, who penned the
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feminist classic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin, often cited as the
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founder of philosophical anarchism. Basically, he thought governments were stunting our ability
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to reason, and humankind could only really progress if state institutions didn't exist at all
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Maybe in an anarchist society, more people would remember that Frankenstein is the name of the
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doctor. Mental floss tangent! Also, to be even more of a stickler, Dr. Frankenstein isn't actually
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a doctor. He's a medical student in the book. We cover even more frustrating Frankenstein
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misconceptions in our episode about literature. Check it out. English novelist Martin Amos is best known for books like Money and London Fields His father Kingsley Amos was also a novelist His debut novel a satire of university life called Lucky Jim hit shelves in 1954 In
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1990, People's Jonathan Cooper described the father-son pair as close, though they share a
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clamorously public rivalry. Here's what Kingsley had to say about London Fields
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I suppose I should have tried to read every page, but it was beyond me. That's British for I love
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you, son. Virginia Woolf's father was English philosopher and literary critic Leslie Stephen
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who edited the First Dictionary of National Biography, which the National Portrait Gallery
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describes as the most ambitious literary project of its day. Stephen actually got knighted in 1902
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for his contributions to the field of literature. Other celebrated writers were more generally born
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into the world of academia. T.S. Eliot's grandfather was the co-founder of Washington
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University in St. Louis, and Emily Dickinson's grandfather helped finance the establishment of
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Amherst College in the early 1820s. Ursula K. Le Guin's father was Alfred Krober, an acclaimed
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anthropologist who helped popularize anthropology as an academic and professional field of study in
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the U.S. In 1935, Irine Julio Curie and her husband, Frederick Julio, took home the Nobel
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Prize in Chemistry for their work in synthesizing new radioactive elements. Irine's mother, Marie
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Curie, had won the same prize back in 1911, also for working with radioactive elements
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Eight years before that, Marie and her husband, Irin's father, Pierre, had won the physics prize for, you guessed it, studying radiation
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Irin is one of no less than eight Nobel Prize winners with a Nobel Prize winning parent
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Or two, in Irin's case. Let's end with Louis Zuborowski, a race car driver who, in the 1920s, developed a series of cars called Chitty Bang Bang
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which inspired Ian Fleming's 1964 kids' book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Magical Car, and the 1968 movie musical based on it
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You heard that right. The same guy created James Bond and everyone's favorite flying car
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Seems like you'd need some serious capital to fund the invention of a flashy new race car
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and Lewis had it in spades. His dad, Elliot Zabarowski, was a race car driver from New
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Jersey who had inherited millions from his businessman father. There was big money on
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Lewis' mother's side too. She was a member of New York's famed Astor family. Lewis was far from the
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Astor's only Nepo baby, but he was probably the only one who indirectly gave us a musical
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in which Dick Van goes undercover as a weird clown doll to rescue a bunch of kids from an evil
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despot. So I'm actually pro-Nepo Baby in this case. That's not to say we're knocking all other
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Nepo Babies. Plenty of them have earned their places in history. But it's always good to
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acknowledge the doors open to people who have rich relatives, or, you know, a dad who knows
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the manager of a clogging troupe. Thanks for watching The List Show. Make sure to subscribe
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to get even more videos about historical Nepo Babies, or you know, equally niche and interesting
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topics and I'll see you next time
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