List of Famous people who born in 1956

Paul Thomas Cook is an English drummer and member of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols. He was also called "Cookie" by his friends on the punk music scene.

Thomas Lars Wassberg is a Swedish former cross-country skier. A fast skating style – push for every leg – is still called "Wassberg" after him in several countries. Wassberg's skiing idols when growing up were Sixten Jernberg and Oddvar Brå. He has described his mental strength and physical fitness as his greatest abilities as a skier, with his main weakness being a lack of sprinting ability.

Charles L. Bennett is an American observational astrophysicist. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

Simon Boswell is a BAFTA-nominated British film score composer, conductor, producer and musician, with more than 90 credits to his name. He is known for combining mainly electronic elements with orchestral.

Kenny Leon is an American director, producer, actor, and author, notable for his work on Broadway, on television, and in regional theater. In 2014, he won the Tony Award for Best Director of a Play for A Raisin in the Sun.

Michael James Benton is a British palaeontologist, and professor of vertebrate palaeontology in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His published work has mostly concentrated on the evolution of Triassic reptiles but he has also worked on extinction events and faunal changes in the fossil record.

Lee Mark Ranaldo is an American musician, singer-songwriter, guitarist, writer, visual artist and record producer, best known as a co-founder of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Ranaldo at number 33 on its "Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list. In May 2012, Spin published a staff-selected top 100 guitarist list, ranking Ranaldo and his Sonic Youth bandmate Thurston Moore together at number 1.

John Dahl is an American film and television director and writer, best known for his work in the neo-noir genre.