List of Famous people who died in 1937

Reginald Joseph Mitchell CBE, FRAeS, was a British aircraft designer who worked for the Southampton aviation company Supermarine from 1920 to 1936. He is best remembered for designing racing seaplanes such as the Supermarine S.6B, and the Supermarine Spitfire.

Arthur John Priest was an English fireman and stoker who was notable for surviving five ship sinkings including the RMS Titanic, HMHS Asturias, the RMS Alcantara, HMHS Britannic and the SS Donegal. Due to these incidents, Priest gained the moniker "the unsinkable stoker".

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, born Joseph-Casimir Rabearivelo, is widely considered to be Africa's first modern poet and the greatest literary artist of Madagascar. Part of the first generation raised under French colonization, Rabearivelo grew up impoverished and failed to complete secondary education. His passion for French literature and traditional Malagasy poetry (ohabolana) prompted him to read extensively and educate himself on a variety of subjects, including the French language and its poetic and prose traditions. He published his first poems as an adolescent in local literary reviews, soon obtaining employment at a publishing house where he worked as a proofreader and editor of its literary journals. He published numerous poetry anthologies in French and Malagasy as well as literary critiques, an opera, and two novels.

Marjorie de Loosey Oelrichs Duchin, nicknamed "Bubbles", was an American socialite. The daughter of Marjorie Ramely Oelrichs (1883–1952) and Charles de Loosey Oelrichs (1882–1973), she became the wife of dance bandleader Eddy Duchin after the two met at the Waldorf, and wed on June 5, 1935. A well-known New York and Newport beauty, she was described by Vogue as having "waxen skin and eyebrows like butterflies." An Edward Steichen photograph of Oelrichs was included in an advertisement for Pond's cold cream in a 1926 copy of Ladies' Home Journal. Oelrichs died six days after the 1937 birth of the couple's son, Peter Duchin.

Gustave Verbeek was a Dutch-American illustrator and cartoonist, best known for his newspaper cartoons in the early 1900s featuring an inventive use of word play and visual storytelling tricks.

Jaishankar Prasad was a prominent figure in modern Hindi literature as well as Hindi theatre. Prasad was his pen name.

Redoshi was a West African woman from Nigeria taken to the U.S. state of Alabama as a girl in 1860. Until a later surviving claimant, Matilda McCrear, was announced in 2020, she was considered to have been the last surviving victim of the transatlantic slave trade. Taken captive in warfare at age 12 from the Slave Coast of West Africa, she was sold to Americans and transported by ship to the United States, in violation of U.S. law. She was sold again and enslaved on the upcountry plantation of the Washington Smith family in Dallas County, Alabama, where her owner renamed her Sally Smith.

Florence Balcombe was the wife and literary executor of Bram Stoker. She is remembered for her legal dispute with the makers of Nosferatu, an unauthorised film based on her husband's novel Dracula.

Rossa Matilda Richter, who used the stage name Zazel, was an English aerialist and actor who became known as the first human cannonball at the age of 14. She began performing at a very young age, practicing aerial stunts like tightrope walking in an old London church. She took up ballet, gymnastics, and trapeze by the time she was 6 and, at 12, went on tour with a travelling acrobat troupe. In 1877, she was the first person to be fired out of a cannon, in front of a large crowd at the Royal Aquarium.

Ida Irene Dalser was the first wife of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.