List of Famous people who died in 1940

Edward LeSaint was an American stage and film actor and director whose career began in the silent era. He acted in over 300 films and directed more than 90. He was sometimes credited as Edward J. Le Saint.

John William Abercrombie was President of the University of Alabama and a member of the United States House of Representatives from Alabama.

Julien Vervaecke was a Belgian professional road bicycle racer. He won Paris–Roubaix, Paris–Brussels, 2 stages in the Tour de France and finished 3rd in the 1927 Tour de France. At the start of the Second World War, when an English army detachment wanted to take his house, he refused, and was shot. His body was found weeks later, so the exact date of his death is not known.

Paul Juon was a Russian-born Swiss composer.

Takitarō Minakami was the pen-name of Abe Shōzō, a Japanese novelist and literary critic active during the Shōwa period of Japan.

Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a Professor at London School of Economics and was highly influential as the teacher of such notable anthropologists as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes all of whose work overshadowed his own.

Sir Arthur Harden, FRS was a British biochemist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1929 with Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin for their investigations into the fermentation of sugar and fermentative enzymes. He was a founding member of the Biochemical Society and editor of its journal for 25 years.