Actors/Directors/Entertainment Personalities
Kate Bosworth (b. 1983), known for her acting roles in The Horse Whisperer (1998), Blue Crush (2002), Superman Returns (2006), and 21 (2008) lived in Darien for several years while growing up, attending Middlesex Middle School and Darien High.
Topher Grace (b. 1978) was raised in Darien. He has acted in That '70s Show, Spider-Man 3, and Interstellar. More of his roles can be seen on his IMDB page.
Boris Karloff (1887-1969), a renowned early Hollywood horror actor, rented a house (known as "Blue Spruce") in Tokeneke with his wife and infant daughter from 1941 to 1944 while he was performing in the Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace. Karloff, who was born in England, appreciated Blue Spruce for its semblance to his childhood home and its close proximity to the Tokeneke Beach Club.
Edwin Milton Royle (1862-1942) was a prolific stage actor and playwright who lived on Brookside Road with his family from 1910 until the early 1920s.
Scott Pelley (b. 1957) is currently an anchor for the CBS Evening News and correspondent to 60 Minutes. He has lived with his family in Darien since 2007.
Chloë Sevigny (b. 1974) was raised in Darien and graduated from Darien High School in 1992. She appeared in Boys Don't Cry, American Psycho, Party Monster, Dogville, and the TV show, Big Love. More listings can be found on her IMDB page.
Gus van Sant (b. 1952) grew up in Darien and graduated from Darien High School in 1970. Van Sant is best known for directing Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Good Will Hunting (1997), Finding Forrester (2000), and Milk (2008).
Steve Wilkos (b. 1964), host of the tabloid talk show The Steve Wilkos Show, lives with his family in Darien.
Artists
Gordon Aymar (1893-1989), a portrait painter and art editor distinguished for his pioneering work in advertising, lived in Darien on Ring's End Landing North from 1928 to 1950.
Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971): Photojournalist for Life magazine beginning in the 1930s who would go on to become the United State's first female war correspondent during World War II. She is most famous for photographing the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany, Mahatma Gandhi, and the 1947 India-Pakistan partition. Bourke-White lived in a house on Darien's Point O' Woods Road from 1938 until her death in 1971.
Leon Carroll (1887-1937) was a fixture of the American modern art scene in the first half of the 20th century and was most well-known for his floral paintings. Carroll lived in Darien on Prospect Avenue from the mid-1920s until his death and was a founding member of the Guild of the Seven Arts.
Gus Edson (1901-1966) wrote and illustrated The Gumps comic strip from 1935 to 1959 and Dondi from 1955 until his death (Dondi was adapted to a film in 1961). Edson lived in Darien on Brookside Road in the 1940s before moving to Stamford.
Major Felten (1904-1975), a noted art-deco painter, was born in the upstate town of Canaan and lived in Darien for much of his artistic career. Felten was a periodic contributor to art shows put on by the Guild of the Seven Arts.
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), a famed abstract expressionist painter, lived on Contentment Island in the Tokeneke section of town from 1999 until her death.
John C. Huffington (1864-1929) was a self-taught painter who specialized in watercolors of America's northeastern shoreline. Huffington began living in Darien in 1889 and spent the last seven years of his life on a houseboat on the Five Mile River. He was also a founding member of the Guild of the Seven Arts.
Karl Lang (1897-1952) was a German-born sculptor who lived in Darien on Nearwater Lane from 1936 until his death. Lang served as the project foreman for the creation of the Mount Rushmore sculpture in the 1930s, and designed and executed several Public Works Art Projects throughout southwestern Connecticut as part of FDR's New Deal. One project, a sculpture of four soldiers encircling a flagpole, still stands in Darien's Spring Grove Cemetery.
Walt Kelly (1913-1973) was a cartoonist best known for his Pogo comic strip, which was syndicated by Post-Hall from 1949 until 1975, two years after his death from diabetes complications. Kelly lived in Darien on Old Kings Highway from 1941 until the late 1960s when he and his wife moved to California.
Ben Larrabee: is a fine arts photographer who has had his work displayed at Darien Library and the Darien Sports Shop among other locations.
Serge Nekrassoff (1895-1985) was a Russian-born metal craftsmen who established a workshop in Darien at 1 Post Road in 1932. Nekrassoff designed decorative metalwork for private homes, and his creations drew the attention of national media outlets for their complexity and meticulous creation. Nekrassoff shuttered his workshop and moved to Stuart, Florida in 1952.
Dorothea Warren O'Hara (1873-1972) was a pottery artist who helped to elevate American ceramics from a mundane craft to the status of high art in the first half of the 20th century. She and her husband bought a farm on Appletree Lane in 1918 and converted the farm's barn into a pottery studio. Warren O'Hara was a founding member of Darien's Guild of the Seven Arts and lived in Darien until her death at the age of 98.
Authors
Sara Goff: author of I Always Cry at Weddings
Kristen Harnish: author of The Vintner's Daughter and The California Wife.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh's (1906-2001) 1955 nonfiction work, Gift from the Sea, a meditation on the lives of 20th-century women, spent 80 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and has been translated into 45 languages. Other notable works include North to the Orient (1935) and The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (1940). Morrow Lindbergh continued to spend time at the Lindbergh family home in the Tokeneke section of Darien until the 1990s, when she moved with one of her daughters to Vermont (see Charles Lindbergh under 'Other Notable Residents').
Nina (N.A.) Nelson: is a children's author for the book, Bringing the Boy Home.
Joanna Scott (b. 1960), author of Follow Me (2009), The Closest Possible Union (1988), as well as nine other novels, grew up in Darien and graduated from Darien High School in 1978. As a high school student she was a member of EMS-Post 53.
Designers/Inventors
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) lived in Darien in the Salem Straits neighborhood from the 1930s until his death in 1983. Fuller was a futurist inventor and is most known for designing the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion Car, which was first unveiled at the Darien Metro North Station in 1933.
Lurelle Guild (1898-1986): Industrial designer famous for the art-deco houseware designs he crafted for Alcoa and Electrolux from the 1930s through the 50s. He also operated an interior decorating service in Darien, Dale Decorators, and designed and renovated several homes in the area as well.
William Starling Burgess (1878-1947) was a civil engineer and noted designer of planes, yachts, and weaponry. Burgess lived in Darien in the 1930s while operating his Manhattan design firm, Burgess & Morgan, Ltd. While a Darien resident, he aided Buckminster Fuller in his design of the Dymaxion Car.
Government
Christopher "Chris" Shays (b. 1945) grew up in Darien and graduated from Darien High School in 1964. Between 1987 and 2009 he represented the 4th Congressional District of Connecticut in the United States House of Representatives as a member of the GOP before being succeeded by Democrat Jim Himes.
Musicians
Frank La Forge (1879-1953) was a composer and concert pianist who lived on Old Kings Highway from 1935 until 1950. While in Darien, La Forge hosted several charity concerts, including one for the Darien Police Pension Fund in 1946.
Alexander Markov (b. 1971), a pop concert violinist, graduated from Darien High School in 1989 (although he lived with his parents in Rowayton).
Moby (b. 1965) grew up in Darien and graduated from Darien High School in 1983. He is best known for helping to popularize dance/electronic music in the 1990s and early 2000s and has been nominated for six Grammy awards.
Herbert Witherspoon (1873-1935) was an operatic basso who lived in Darien on Tokeneke Drive from 1915 until 1925 after retiring from the Metropolitan Opera. Witherspoon spent most of his time in Darien focusing on the instruction of opera singing before moving to Illinois in 1925 to become president of the Chicago Musical College.
Other Notable Residents
Lisa Bonchek Adams (1969-2015) was a Darien homemaker who, after being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2007, began keeping an influential blog about her thoughts and experiences as a young wife and mother living with a debilitating disease. Her blog attracted an international readership and media attention.
Alex Kelly (b. 1967) is a convicted rapist whose 1986 rape of a Darien High School girl and another girl from Stamford attracted national media attention. The Darien community and its affluent culture received much scrutiny throughout the legal proceedings, especially in Sheila Weller's 1997 work of journalism, Saint of Circumstance.
Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) lived in Darien with his family in a house on Contentment Island in the Tokeneke area from the end of World War II until his death in 1974. Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, wished to raise their two daughters and three sons in privacy after the highly publicized kidnapping and murder of their first son, Charles, and so were attracted to the relative isolation of Tokeneke. The older daughter, Anne, remembers their Tokeneke home as "an old stone house, on the Long Island Sound, surrounded by stretches of mud and marsh grass along the shore and cattails near the road - a place of great privacy and security for the cautious family and a marvelous place to grow up." Out of respect to their privacy, Tokeneke residents rarely divulged information to the rest of the Darien community about the Lindberghs.
Stephen T. Mather (1867-1930), the first director of the United States National Park Service, was for several years the sole owner of the Mather Homestead, which he and his family often used as a summer retreat.
