Miguel de Cervantes

Spanish author of the masterpiece novel Don Quixote. The early 17th-century work tells the story of a man driven so mad by reading chivalrous tales that he comes to believe he is a knight.

He worked in his youth as an assistant to a Roman priest, and he later enlisted in the Spanish Navy. As a young man, he devised a plan to run away and marry his lover; however, her father discovered their plan and forbade her to see Cervantes ever again.

His father, Rodrigo, was both a barber and a surgeon, and his mother was sold into matrimony by her impoverished father in 1543. He grew up with six siblings. In 1584, he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios and he had a daughter named Isabel de Saavedra.

Vanessa Williams appeared in a film based on Cervantes' famous work, Don Quixote.