List of Famous people who died in 1953

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet politician who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. During his years in power, he served as both General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Despite initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he ultimately consolidated power to become the Soviet Union's de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism while his own policies are known as Stalinism.

Mary of Teck was Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions from 1910 until 1936 as the wife of King George V. She was concurrently Empress of India.

John Reginald Halliday Christie, known to his family and friends as Reg Christie, was an English serial killer and alleged necrophile active during the 1940s and early 1950s. Christie murdered at least eight people—including his wife, Ethel—by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. The bodies of three of Christie's victims were found in a wallpaper-covered kitchen alcove soon after he had moved out of Rillington Place during March 1953. The remains of two more victims were discovered in the garden, and his wife's body was found beneath the floorboards of the front room. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife's murder, for which he was hanged.

Hiram "Hank" Williams was an American singer-songwriter and musician. Regarded as one of the most significant and influential American singers and songwriters of the 20th century, Williams recorded 35 singles that reached the Top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, including 11 that ranked number one.

Pauline Robinson "Robin" Bush was the second child and eldest daughter of the 41st President of the United States, George H. W. Bush, and his wife, First Lady Barbara Bush. After she was born in California, her family soon relocated to Texas, where Robin lived most of her life.

James Francis Thorpe was an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe became the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States. Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics, and played American football, professional baseball, and basketball. He lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the amateurism rules that were then in place. In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored his Olympic medals with replicas after ruling that the decision to strip him of his medals fell outside of the required 30 days, but he is to date listed as co-champion in both the Decathlon and Pentathlon events according to official IOC records

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security, and chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and promoted to deputy premier under Stalin from 1941. He later officially joined the Politburo in 1946.

Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah bin Muhammad Al Saud, known in the West as Ibn Saud, was the founder and first king of Saudi Arabia, the "third Saudi state", reigning from 23 September 1932 to his death. He had ruled parts of the kingdom as early as 1902, having previously been the king of Hejaz and Nejd.

Syama Prasad Mukherjee was an Indian politician, barrister and academician, who served as the Minister for Industry and Supply in Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's cabinet. After falling out with Nehru, protesting against the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, Mukherjee resigned from Nehru's cabinet. With the help of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, he founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor to the Bharatiya Janata Party, in 1951.

Róbert Berény was a Hungarian painter, one of the avant-garde group known as The Eight who introduced cubism and expressionism to Hungarian art in the early twentieth century before the First World War. He had studied and exhibited in Paris as a young man and was also considered one of the Hungarian Fauves.