List of Famous people who died in 1940

Victor Léon, also Viktor Léon was a well-known Jewish Austrian-Hungarian librettist. He collaborated with Leo Stein to produce the libretto of Franz Lehár's romantic operetta The Merry Widow.

Maurice Jaubert was a French composer. A prolific composer, he scored some of the most important films of the early sound era in France, including Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and L’Atalante, and René Clair’s Quatorze Juillet and Le Dernier Milliardaire. Serving in both world wars, he died in action during World War II at the age of 40.

Daniel Frohman was an American theatrical producer and manager, and an early film producer.

Filipp Andreevich Malyavin was a Russian painter and draftsman. Trained in icon-painting as well as having studied under the great Russian realist painter Ilya Repin, Malyavin is unusual among the Russian artists of the time for having a peasant background. It is possibly due to this that his paintings often depict peasant life, and his most famous work, Whirlwind, shows peasant women dancing.