Hmm, this is tough. I’ll have to incorporate an “outsider” who made much of my field possible, I think, although his work was not actually intended for these purposes.
Joseph Bell
Edmund Locard
Francis Galton
Kary Mullis
Pierre Margot
Big animation fan here; done anything I might have seen?
Um… Peter Molyneux, I meant. Not Molyneax. It was a typo, I swear.
Oh yeah, and mine:
Socrates
Plato
Confucius
Christ
Ichabod Crane
I just came back from a little party and dinner that included four such people in my little area of engineering and computer design - and I’m a fifth. (Though I would not say we’re the five most famous, but everyone in the area does know us.)
And for purposes of anonymity, I won’t say more.
My field only has one living superstar, that I know of: Ed Witten. But even he probably isn’t known of by non-physicists.
Chemistry: Nobel, Kekulé, Dewar, Newton (when it was still alchemy), Krebbs
Many of the guys about whom we study in “history of chemistry” were medical doctors; a very large amount were physicists or would be considered physicists nowadays. As one of my professors liked to say “physics is like the light spectrum… you have tiny wavelengths, medium wavelengths where lots of things happen, big wavelengths. And you have tiny physics, chemistry and big physics. Kind of the physicists to leave all these interesting going-ons for us to study!”
Rendering : I got nothin!
Yeager
Hoover
Bader
Gann
Biggles 
Ad copywriting: David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, David Abbott, and William Bernbach. That’s four, but that’s really all I’m coming up with. In copywriting, successful copy is far more famous than the person who writes it.
I was going to add Neil French to that list, but he’s far more famous for simply being a colossal cunt who’s now running the First Annual Golden Spitball Awards. I confess to being more than a little amused that we recently received yet another invitation to enter in time for yet another deadline extension, meaning not enough suckers were ponying up the $400 entry fee to fill the book of entries they hope to sell for $80 each later this year.
This interesting to me, because I’ve often thought about this–that there are people I or my husband would be breathlessly thrilled to meet, but they go through their general life without most people knowing who they are. There are a handful of woodworkers my husband feels this way about.
Anyway, in my field of higher education research, there are about a dozen or so people I think of being as real “rock stars” that everyone would know. That list would include Patrick Terenzini, William Bowen, George Kuh, Sandy Astin, and Robert Pace. I’ve met all of them at conferences (except Bowen) and I was a little starstruck each time. My advisor also belongs on that list, but to me she was always just my advisor to me. Anyway, for all their fame in my field, I’m sure these people walk through airports and grocery stores entirely undisturbed and unrecognized.
You know, I answered without reading far into the thread so I didn’t even see your thread. How funny that we both mentioned him (and I’d agree with your other choices).
Now I commence boring everyone but you and me.
I’d agree with you on Terenzini being the most-cited, although I also marvel how Vincent Tinto used to get his ass cited off, too, and for just one work on retention! But Terenzini wrote THE DEFINITIVE summary of student research with Ernie Pascarella, which guarantees that he is going to be mentioned in just about anything, even work that doesn’t look at his original research. Deservedly–it was a huge, huge, huge undertaking to do all that work and meta-analysis.
The Pascarella and Terenzini work (which is just fun to say, those two names together) had just come out when I started grad school and that book was like The Bible. The first conference I went to, Pat Terenzini was speaking and you should have heard the ripple of excited whispers that went through the grad school crowd when he walked into the room. I still laugh about that, we all acted like he was Mick Jagger or something.
For my former profession, Physics, and limiting my list to living people who I don’t think are well known to the general public:
Jocelyn Bell Burnell If I were stiffed out of a Nobel Prize, I would not take it with any of the grace she has shown.
Yoichiro Nambu, whose work has been VERY influential behind the scenes.
N. David Mermin I like his “general interest” writing for the physics community. In this essay, search for “laptop”. Isn’t that the greatest question for someone from the year 2100?
And I’ll add the late John Bardeen - double Nobel Laureates should be better known!
Hmmm…so you’re academically trained in the cog sci implications of Basque and Creole phonetics?
I think you just won. 
Have you had the chance to meet any of these people?
Wait a minute, I’ve heard of these people!
No, no wait… I was thinking of Hal Holbrook. Ok, most of them are famous among the general population (I hope).
I don’t have a job as yet, but you can see my demo reel here.
Known to the experts:
Staunton
Philidor
Saavedra
Lucena
Nimzovich
Known to the public:
Fischer
Spassky
Kasparov
Kramnik
Deep Blue
Sure he is! He’s mentioned in lots of books I’ve read.
Living: Mary Fran Hazinski.
Dead: Florence Nightingale, Margaret Sanger, Clara Barton and Walt Whitman.