Famous Americans Who Lived Abroad 

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See some famous Americans throughout history (past and present) that have lived abroad 

*This page and features within this section (including videos) are specifically for educational purposes. More to come soon

Queen Noor of Jordan

Originally from Michigan - now lives in Jordan

Noor Al-Hussein is the American-born queen dowager of Jordan as the widow of King Hussein. She was his fourth spouse and queen consort between their marriage in 1978 and his death in 1999.
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She is the longest-standing member of the Board of Commissioners of the International Commission on Missing Persons. As of 2011, she is president of the United World Colleges movement and an advocate of the anti-nuclear weapons proliferation campaign Global Zero. In 2015, Queen Noor received the Woodrow Wilson Award for her public service

QUEEN NOOR FOUDATION: ​http://www.nooralhusseinfoundation.org/

Ernest Hemingway

Originally from Oak Park (just outside Chicago), Illinois

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY FOUNDATION: http://www.ehfop.org/

Princess Grace of Monaco

Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Grace Patricia Kelly was a Monacan-American actress who became Princess of Monaco after marrying Prince Rainier III, in April 1956.
 
After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at age 20, Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions and more than 40 episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, she gained stardom from her performance in the film Mogambo, which won her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination in 1954. Subsequently, she had leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl (1954), for which her deglamorized performance earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Other films include High Noon (1952) with Gary Cooper, Dial M for Murder (1954) with Ray Milland, Rear Window (1954) with James Stewart, To Catch a Thief (1955) with Cary Grant, and High Society (1956) with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
 
Kelly retired from acting at the age of 26 to marry the prince and began her duties as Princess of Monaco. They had three children: Caroline, Albert II, and Stéphanie. Princess Grace suffered a stroke while driving home to Monaco on September 13, 1982 and had a road accident which led to her death the following day.
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​PRINCESS GRACE FOUNDATION: https://www.pgfusa.org/
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Gertrude Stein

Originally from Allegheny, Pennsylvania

Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris, France in 1903, and made it her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse, would meet.
 
In 1933, Ms. Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her life partner Alice B. Toklas, an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works have become widely known: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" and "there is no there there",  with the latter often taken to be a reference to her childhood home of Oakland, California.
 
Her books include Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum) (1903), which was about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of Stein's female friends, Fernhurst, a fictional story about a romantic affair, Three Lives (1905–06), and The Making of Americans (1902–1911). In Tender Buttons (1914), Stein commented on lesbian sexuality.

​SUPPORT GERTRUDE STEIN: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gertrude-stein

Frederick Douglass

Originally from Maryland

Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and a statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, which he  gained note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In Douglass's time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. The Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
 
Douglass wrote several autobiographies. He described his experiences as a slave in his 1845 autobiography, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," an American Slave, which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, "Life and Times of Frederick Douglass." First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, 3 years before his death, it covered events during and after the Civil War. Douglass had also actively supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. Without his approval, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate and Vice Presidential nominee of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket.
 
Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union With Slaveholders", criticized Douglass' willingness to dialogue with slave owners, he famously replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.


​FREDERICK DOUGLASS FOUNDATION: http://www.tfdf.org/

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Benjamin Franklin

Originally from Boston, Massachusetts 

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Franklin was a renowned polymath and a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, humorist, composer, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. And as an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, which includes one of many other inventions. He facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphia's fire department and the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution.
 
Franklin has earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity, initially as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies. He has earned the title of the first United States Ambassador to France; he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin has set the foundation in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."
 
Mr. Franklin has become a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, which was the leading city in the colonies. He published the Pennsylvania Gazette at the age of 23. He became rich publishing this and Poor Richard's Almanack, which he authored under the pseudonym "Richard Saunders". After 1767, he was associated with the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British policies.

​THE PHILADELPHIA FOUNDATION: ​https://www.philafound.org/Donors/StartGiving/WhatCanIDoThroughAFund/BenFranklinFunds.aspx