List of Famous people who born in 1921

Eileen Muriel Younghusband, BEM was a filter officer in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in World War II. She worked in the filter room, a top-level British air defence hub which assessed radar reports in order to give air raid warnings. Later, while posted to Belgium, she was part of a team of mathematicians who alerted Allied forces to the location of V-2 rocket launch sites.

Frank Thornton Ball, professionally known as Frank Thornton, was an English actor. He was known for playing Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? and its sequel Grace & Favour and as Herbert "Truly" Truelove in Last of the Summer Wine.

Hiroshi Miyazawa was the governor of Hiroshima Prefecture from 1973 to 1981 and justice minister from 1995 to 1996.

Murray Bookchin was an American anarchist, political philosopher, trade-union organizer, and educator. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning, within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called communalism, which seeks to reconcile Marxist and anarchist thought.

Squadron Leader Geoffrey Harris Augustus Wellum DFC was a British fighter pilot and author, best known for his participation in the Battle of Britain. Born an only child in Walthamstow, Essex, Wellum was educated at Forest School, Snaresbrook before serving in the RAF. After the war he remained in the RAF until 1961, and later ran a haulage business. In the mid-1980s he retired and moved to Mullion, Cornwall, where he wrote down his wartime memoirs. In 2002 these were published as First Light.

Howell Thomas Heflin was an American lawyer and politician who served in the United States Senate representing Alabama from 1979 to 1997. He chose not to run for reelection in 1996.

James Allen Whitmore Jr. was an American film, theatre, and television actor. During his career, he won three of the four EGOT honors: a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy. Whitmore also won a Golden Globe and was nominated for two Academy Awards.

Heinz Bennent was a German actor.

Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.

Thomaz Soares da Silva, also known as Zizinho, was a Brazilian footballer who played as an attacking midfielder for the Brazil national football team. He came to international prominence at the 1950 World Cup, where he scored two goals. He was lauded as a complete player, with an array of offensive skills such as his dribbling, passing, and shooting ability with both feet, as well as his accuracy from dead ball situations and extraordinary vision, and is often considered the best Brazilian footballer of the pre-Pelé era.