Famous people and the one watch we remember them by

The watch that carried a message

Some watches slip into a famous life and never quite leave. Paul Newman is the clearest case. Around 1969 his wife, Joanne Woodward, bought him a Rolex Daytona Cosmograph and had the caseback engraved with the words Drive Carefully Me. It was a small, private, slightly worried message from someone who knew he raced cars.

That watch, a reference 6239, went on to set a wristwatch auction record of $17.75M in 2017. Yet the odd part of the story is how late the world noticed. Vintage Newman Daytonas were selling for a couple of hundred dollars until a mid-1980s Italian magazine cover put one on his wrist, and the price of the whole family began to climb into the thousands.

There is a lesson there for collectors. A watch can sit quietly for years, and a single photograph can rewrite its reputation. Marlon Brando’s GMT-Master and Newman’s Daytona have been seen by billions of moviegoers, and the watches themselves are now remembered as part of the men.

Cartier and the quiet royals

Cartier has a long habit of turning up on famous wrists. Louis Cartier designed the Santos in 1904 for the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, and the Tank followed in 1917, inspired by the shape of the Renault FT tank.

The stories around the Tank are tender ones. John F. Kennedy’s example was engraved by Jackie and sold at Christie’s in 2005 for $120,000. Princess Diana, meanwhile, moved away from the diamond watches given to her by the royal family and chose an inexpensive Cartier instead, which says a good deal about how she wanted to be seen.

Kate Middleton almost always wears her classic Cartier Ballon Bleu, a design introduced in 2007. Tyler, the Creator wears a vintage yellow-gold Cartier Crash. He also spent years searching eBay for the SpongeBob SquarePants watch from his childhood, a reminder that a favourite watch does not have to be expensive to matter.

Silver screen and racing paddock

Movies have made some watches famous almost by accident. Sean Connery wore a Big Crown Rolex Submariner reference 6538 in the early Bond films, and Honor Blackman wore a Rolex GMT-Master as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger in 1965. James Gandolfini wore an 18k yellow gold Rolex President Day-Date as Tony Soprano, a watch that suited the character’s swagger.

Steve McQueen’s story is a good one for anyone who likes details. Jack Heuer had named the Carrera in 1963 after the Carrera Panamericana race in Mexico. The Porsche works driver Jo Siffert was a Heuer ambassador who wore an Autavia chronograph, and for Le Mans in 1971 McQueen copied Siffert’s overalls, Heuer patch included, and wore a Heuer Monaco.

Care is needed here, though. The Rolex Explorer II nicknamed Steve McQueen has no evidence behind it that he ever wore one. Nicknames can be stubborn, and the true story is often the Monaco on the track.

Moon, mountain and the Speedmaster

Few watches carry as much history as the Omega Speedmaster. Neil Armstrong wore one on the moon, and Buzz Aldrin wore his Speedmaster Professional reference 105.012 on the lunar surface on 21 July 1969. NASA has used Speedmasters since the 1960s, and Omega later released an Apollo 11 50th Anniversary edition.

Not every astronaut stuck to one brand. William Pogue wore a Seiko 6139 chronograph on Skylab 4 in 1973 alongside his Omega. Closer to earth, Steve Carell wore a Speedmaster in the Space Force trailer, and Ellen DeGeneres regularly wears hers on her show.

The Everest story belongs here too. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay wore the Rolex Explorer on the mountain in 1953. Some watches are famous because of who wore them, and others because of where they went.

Artists who made watches their own

Andy Warhol is an unusual case. He owned many watches, and some of them did not even work. He owned at least seven Piagets, including reference 15102, which he bought in 1973. In 2024 Piaget licensed that design with the Andy Warhol Foundation and released it as the Black Tie.

Piaget’s ties to art run further. Its Dali d’Or collaboration with Salvador Dali began in 1967. Virgil Abloh, meanwhile, customised an emerald-encrusted Patek Philippe Nautilus that Drake owns, and Drake also wore a 40th-anniversary Nautilus, limited to 1,300 units in 2016.

Karl Lagerfeld commissioned an all-black Audemars Piguet in the 1970s. John Mayer worked with G-Shock in 2020 on the reference 6900, based on a Casio keyboard he played. In each case the watch is less a status symbol than a small piece of personal taste.

Ambassadors, sister brands and sale rooms

Sometimes a person becomes the face of a brand, and the story shifts. Brad Pitt was first a TAG Heuer ambassador and then joined Breitling’s Cinema Squad in 2018. In 2017 Tudor’s Born To Dare campaign featured David Beckham, Lady Gaga and Jay Chou, with Lady Gaga choosing the Black Bay.

Tudor itself has a story worth knowing. Hans Wilsdorf, the founder of Rolex, registered the name in 1926, and the two remain sister companies. Its Oyster Prince went with the British North Greenland expedition of 1952 to 1954, and the North Flag of 2015 honoured it.

The auction room has its own famous names. Elvis Presley’s Omega sold for $1.8 million in 2018, and Sylvester Stallone’s Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime sold for $5.4 million in 2024. Eric Clapton’s Patek 2499 sold for $3.6M. Still, the stories collectors keep retelling are about the people, not the totals.