List of Famous people who born in 1917

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his work as president concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in both houses of the U.S. Congress prior to becoming president.

Pedro Infante Cruz was a popular Mexican actor and ranchera singer, whose career spanned over two decades, and whose fame and popularity also spread to other Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Guatemala and Peru, having appeared in multiple movies during the golden age of Mexican cinema.

Dame Vera Margaret Lynn was an English singer, songwriter and entertainer whose musical recordings and performances were very popular during the Second World War. She was widely referred to as the "Forces' Sweetheart" and gave outdoor concerts for the troops in Egypt, India and Burma during the war as part of Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). The songs most associated with her are "We'll Meet Again", "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover", "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" and "There'll Always Be an England".

Marsha Hunt is an American actress, model, and activist, with a career spanning over 70 years. She was blacklisted by Hollywood film studio executives in the 1950s during McCarthyism. She is one of the last surviving actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval was a Chilean composer, singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and visual artist. She pioneered the Nueva Canción Chilena, a renewal and a reinvention of Chilean folk music that would extend its sphere of influence outside Chile. Parra is acknowledged as "the Mother of Latin American folk".

Mostefa Ben-Boulaïd was an Algerian revolutionary leader.

Barbara Vernice Franklin was the mother of American singer–songwriter Aretha Franklin and wife of C. L. Franklin, the African-American Baptist minister of New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan.

Franciszka Manheimer-Rosenberg, better known as Franceska Mann, was a Polish Jewish ballerina who according to some accounts had killed a Nazi guard while a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Schillinger, and wounded at least one other, Wilhelm Emmerich, initiating an uprising among female Jewish prisoners before she was killed, presumably by gunfire. In the most popular version of the event, but never verified, Mann is said to have performed a striptease for members of the Nazi regime and once down to naught but high heels, took one of her shoes and stabbed Walter Quakernack in the face with the heel-piece, causing him to drop his firearm, which she then used to shoot Schillinger and Emmerich. Schillinger ultimately died from his wounds several hours later while Emmerich was left with a permanent limp. According to another account, however, she was a Nazi collaborator who was executed by the Polish underground in the Fall of 1942.

Amal al-Atrash, better known by her stage name Asmahan, was an Egyptian singer from Syrian background who lived and rose to fame in Egypt. Having immigrated to Egypt at the age of three years old, her family knew the composer Dawood Hosni, and she sang the compositions of Mohamed El Qasabgi and Zakariyya Ahmad. She also sang the compositions of Mohammed Abdel Wahab and her brother Farid al-Atrash, a then rising star musician in his own right. Her voice was one of the few female voices in Arab music world to pose serious competition to that of Umm Kulthum, who is considered to be one of the Arab world's most distinguished singers of the 20th century. Her mysterious death in an automobile accident shocked the public. Journalists spread gossip about her turbulent personal life and an alleged espionage role in World War II.

Joan Hume McCracken was an American dancer, actress, and comedian who became famous for her role as Sylvie in the original 1943 production of Oklahoma! She also was noted for her performances in the Broadway shows Bloomer Girl (1944), Billion Dollar Baby (1945) and Dance Me a Song (1950), and the films Hollywood Canteen (1945) and Good News (1947).