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Sabrina Carpenter has been making a habit of breaking UK chart records.

When the Pennsylvania-born singer hit number one and two in the charts with, respectively, her singles Please Please Please and Espresso in June 2024, she became the youngest female artist in history to do so. She also went on to hold the top two positions in the singles rundown for three successive weeks - a rare feat managed previously by acts such as The Beatles and Ed Sheeran.

First coming to viewers’ attention on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World when she was 15 years old, Sabrina has managed to remain in the public eye and make the transition from star in her youth to continued success as an adult, opening for Taylor Swift on her global Eras tour.

History has many examples of people who, like Sabrina, had success early on in life, and the achievements just kept on coming. ����ý Bitesize presents a few examples.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Classical genius aged three

Classical music has long been an influence on pop and, in the 18th Century, one of its most famous composers was wowing audiences at a young age.

When he was three years old, the Austrian-born Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was able to pick out chords on the harpsichord. By the time he was four, he could play short musical pieces and he started composing at the age of five. Before he turned six, the young Mozart was taken to Munich by his father to play in Bavaria and it wasn’t long before his instrumental skills were being heard in noble houses in Vienna.

By the time he was a teenager, Mozart and his sister Nannerl had toured extensively in western Europe, including a 15-month stay in London.

Although it was a relative novelty for a child to be so musically gifted, Mozart still stood out from his musical peers as he grew older. In the year he turned 30, his opera The Marriage of Figaro was unveiled to the public, followed a year later by Don Giovanni. He died in 1791, aged 35.

Judit Polgár: Chess Grandmaster at 12

Born in Hungary in 1976, Judit Polgár is the youngest of three sisters. They all play chess to an exceptional standard, but it is the baby of the siblings who has left a particularly significant stamp on the sport.

At the age of 12, Polgár had earned the International Master title and became the youngest International Grandmaster ever when she was 15 years old, beating the record set by the legendary Bobby Fischer by a month. The record has since been broken.

Polgár made a point of entering as many mixed competitions as possible when she was growing up, rather than focusing on female-only ones. It led to her beating the former champion Boris Spassky in 1993 and, in the year she turned 18, becoming the first woman to win a Grandmaster tournament that was open to both men and women.

In 2005, Polgár became the first woman to ever rank in the world’s Top 10 chess players (at number eight) and she was the number one women’s player from 1989 to 2015, a 26-year run at the top. Polgár retired from competitive chess in 2014. She is still a respected member of the chess world and regularly commentates on major tournaments.

Stevie Wonder: Recording his first single at 12

The Stevie Wonder songbook is familiar to millions of fans throughout the world. His signature soulful style plays out across hits including Superstition, Happy Birthday and I Just Called to Say I Love You.

Wonder went blind shortly after his birth in 1950 and music played a big part in his life from an early age. He was an instrumentalist by the age of eight and his signature sound throughout his life would come from the piano, organ, drums and harmonica.

At 12, he recorded Fingertips (Part 2) with the influential Motown Records label, where he was named Little Stevie Wonder by its president, Berry Gordy. In 1964, the ‘Little’ was dropped form his professional name and Wonder continued to release records that became big hits for the rest of the 1960s and into the ’70s and ’80s. His sound became influential to other acts as well, including Beyoncé and John Legend.

In 2005, Wonder received a Grammy Award noting his lifetime contribution to the music world.

Shirley Temple: Academy Award winner aged six

In the 1930s, Shirley Temple was one of the biggest box office draws in Hollywood.

Born in 1928, she appeared in a host of films as a child actress, often musicals where she could show off her singing and dancing skills. The 1935 film Curly Top, featured Temple’s performance of Animal Crackers in My Soup, which became one of her most famous songs. Her early fame coincided with the Great Depression in the USA, and her optimistic films were seen by many moviegoers as a distraction from the hardships in real life. She received a special Academy Award in 1934 in recognition of her contribution to entertaining audiences.

By the end of the 1930s, and into the 1940s, Temple’s popularity had dropped and she made her final film in 1949. After spending time in television, Temple’s second successful career began - in politics.

Under the name Shirley Temple Black, she had a number of high-profile roles, including US ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976, and ambassador to the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia between 1989 and 1992.

In the early 1970s, Temple Black went public about having breast cancer, something that was unusual for celebrities to do at the time. She has since been credited for helping women feel more comfortable about discussing their own diagnoses.

Temple Black died in 2014, aged 85.

This article was published in August 2024