List of Famous people who died in 1955

Joonas "Jonni" Myyrä was a Finnish athlete who competed at the 1912, 1920 and 1924 Olympics. In 1912, he finished eighth in the javelin throw. At the 1920 Olympics his left arm was fractured in a warm-up accident – the spear thrown by James Lincoln struck Myyrä while he was resting on the grass. Nevertheless, Myyrä won the javelin event with an Olympic record of 65.78 meters. He also finished 12th in the discus throw, but could not complete his pentathlon events. Myyrä successfully defended his javelin title at the 1924 Summer Olympics, and then fled to the United States due to his financial problems in Finland. He never returned to his home country and died in San Francisco in 1955.

Valentin Alexandrovich Dogiel was a Russian and Soviet zoologist, specialized in parasitology and protozoology. He was a professor at the St. Petersburg / Leningrad State University since 1913, and head of the Laboratory of Protozoology at the Zoological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, since 1944. In 1923 he founded the Laboratory of Parasitology at the Fisheries Research Institute VNIORKh in Leningrad.

Princess Elizabeth Charlotte Alexandra Mary Louise of Hesse-Kassel, was a Princess of Hesse-Kassel by birth and, by her marriage to Leopold, Hereditary Prince of Anhalt, the Hereditary Princess of Anhalt.

Riccardo Stracciari was a leading Italian baritone. His repertoire consisted mainly of Italian operatic works, with Rossini's Figaro and Verdi's Rigoletto becoming his signature roles during a long and distinguished career which stretched from 1899 to 1944.

Daniël George van Beuningen was a Dutch businessman who became iconic for the city of Rotterdam.

Alexandru Proca was a Romanian physicist who studied and worked in France. He developed the vector meson theory of nuclear forces and the relativistic quantum field equations that bear his name for the massive, vector spin-1 mesons.