Michelle Keegan was born in Stockport on 3 June 1987. Not Gibraltar. The Gibraltar link is real and it is worth knowing about, but it belongs to her grandmother, and the difference between those two sentences is the reason most celebrity lists about this place are wrong. It is an easy mistake because the connection is genuine. Her [maternal grandmother was Gibraltarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Keegan), and married a British soldier stationed on the Rock. When Keegan traced the line on Who Do You Think You Are in 2018 it ran back through a Gibraltarian great grandmother, Leonor Orfila, and further back to a Genoese seaman, Giacomo Parodi, who came to Gibraltar as a teenager. That is a Gibraltarian family story. It is not a Gibraltarian birth certificate. So here is the list of people who really were born here, what they are known for, and the three specific mechanisms that keep pulling Gibraltarian names off the Rock before they become famous. |Name|Born|Known for|What happened next| |Ricardo Montez, born Levy Isaac Attias|Gibraltar, 20 September 1923|Juan Cervantes in Mind Your Language|Career in British television, from The Saint to The Avengers, with a final film role in Mamma Mia in 2008| |Jane Clifton|Gibraltar, 10 April 1949|Margo Gaffney in the Australian prison drama Prisoner|Born to British Army parents, emigrated to Perth in 1961, became an Australian citizen in 1992| |John Galliano|Gibraltar, 28 November 1960|Head designer at Givenchy from 1995, then Dior from 1996|Family moved to South London when he was six| |Kaiane Aldorino Lopez|Gibraltar, 8 July 1986|Miss World 2009, the first win for Gibraltar|Stayed, and served as Mayor of Gibraltar from 2017 to 2019| |Albert Hammond|London, 18 May 1944|It Never Rains in Southern California, and writing One Moment in Time|Raised in Gibraltar after the family came back from wartime evacuation| |Michelle Keegan|Stockport, 3 June 1987|Coronation Street, Our Girl, Brassic, Fool Me Once|Gibraltarian maternal grandmother, no Gibraltar birth| Two of those six were not born here at all, and they are the two most people would name first. That is the pattern, and it has causes rather than coincidences. Ricardo Montez is the most complete Gibraltar born screen career on that list, and it is worth looking at properly. He was [born Levy Isaac Attias in Gibraltar on 20 September 1923](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Montez) and died on 26 October 2010. Attias is one of the old Gibraltarian surnames, from the Sephardic community that has been part of the town for centuries and that we wrote about through [Aaron Cardozo](/blog/aaron-cardozo-nelson-gibraltar-jewish-history). He worked constantly in British television from the 1960s, in The Saint, The Avengers and Doctor at Sea, and he was almost always cast as a Spaniard, an Italian or a Mexican. The role he is remembered for is Juan Cervantes, the moustachioed Spanish bartender in Mind Your Language, which ran on ITV from 1977 to 1979 and was revived in 1986. His last film appearance was in Mamma Mia in 2008, in his eighties. There is something exact about that career, and it is not flattering to the industry rather than to him. A man from a territory that is neither Spanish nor entirely British, whose own community speaks a language made of both, spent fifty years being cast as the Spaniard because a British audience wanted an accent. The most interesting thing about where he was from was the one thing nobody asked him to play. Albert Hammond is the most commercially successful musician Gibraltar has produced, with an OBE in 2000 and a Songwriters Hall of Fame induction in 2008. He was [born in London on 18 May 1944](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hammond), because his family was not in Gibraltar to give birth in it. They had been evacuated. In 1940 some 13,500 civilians were shipped off the Rock so that the fortress could be defended without them. They went to Casablanca, were expelled when France fell, and were scattered to London, Madeira and Jamaica. The last of them did not get home until 1951. Hammond's family returned after the war and raised him here. Our post on [the evacuation](/blog/gibraltar-wwii-evacuation-evacuees-story) covers what those years did to the town. Think about what that means for any list of Gibraltar births. For roughly a decade, a whole generation of Gibraltarian children were born somewhere else, in London boarding houses and Jamaican camps, to parents who considered themselves entirely Gibraltarian. Birthplace stopped being a reliable guide to who a person was. It has never fully recovered as a measure here. Jane Clifton was [born in Gibraltar on 10 April 1949](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Clifton) to British Army parents. She left as a child in 1961 for Perth, settled in Melbourne, and became famous in Australia as Margo Gaffney in Prisoner between 1980 and 1984. She is Gibraltar born and not Gibraltarian by descent, which is the exact mirror image of Michel