List of Famous people who died in 1949

Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr. was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1943 to 1949. The ninth and final justice appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is known for his impassioned defenses of civil liberties. Rutledge favored broad interpretations of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause, and he argued that the Bill of Rights applied in its totality to the states. He participated in several noteworthy cases involving the intersection of individual freedoms and the government's wartime powers. Rutledge served on the Court until his death at the age of fifty-five. Legal scholars have generally thought highly of the justice, although the brevity of his tenure has minimized his impact on history.

Sem Benelli was an Italian playwright, essayist and librettist. He provided the texts for several noted Italian operas, including Italo Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre re and L'incantesimo, and Umberto Giordano's La cena delle beffe, based on Benelli's own play of the same title. He was a native of Prato.

James S. Brown Jr. was an American cinematographer. He was a prolific worker with around 150 credits during his career spent generally with lower-budget outfits such as Columbia Pictures, Mayfair Pictures and Monogram Pictures.

Nykyta Budka was a clergyman of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church who lived and worked in Austria-Hungary, Canada, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In Canada, he is noted as the first bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Canada, and was the first Eastern Catholic bishop with full jurisdiction ever appointed in the New World.

Jean-Pierre Wimille was a Grand Prix motor racing driver and a member of the French Resistance during World War II.

Josef Ernst Sachs was a Swedish businessman and one of the two founders of the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in Stockholm.

Joseph A. Valentine (July 24, 1900 in New York City, as Giuseppe Valentino – May 18, 1949 in was an Italian-American cinematographer, five-time nominee for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, and co-winner once in 1949.

Karl Frithiof Sundman was a Finnish mathematician who used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in 1906 and 1909. He also published a paper on regularization methods in mechanics in 1912.