List of Famous people who died in 1956

Reinhold Moritzevich Glière, was a Ukrainian composer of German and Polish descent.

François-Joseph-Claude Jaffrennou was a Breton language writer and editor. He was a Breton nationalist and a neo-druid bard. He is also known as François Taldir-Jaffrennou, since he also used the Druidic name Taldir. He was one of the pioneers of the Breton autonomist movement.

Edwin Thanhouser was an American actor, businessman, and film producer. He was most notable as a founder of the Thanhouser Company, which was one of the first motion picture studios. His wife Gertrude Thanhouser and brother-in-law Lloyd Lonergan were co-founders.

Sergey Nikolayevich Blazhko was a Russian and Soviet astronomer, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1929). He was a graduate of Moscow State University and held a number of positions there including head of the Moscow Observatory from 1920-1931. He discovered a secondary variation of the amplitude and period of some RR Lyrae stars and related pulsating variables, now known as the Blazhko effect.

Dr Avraham Katznelson was a Zionist political figure in Mandate Palestine and a signatory of the Israeli declaration of independence.

Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky was a Russian painter, a member of the Jack of Diamonds group.

William Reeves Eason, known as B. Reeves Eason, was an American film director, actor and screenwriter. His directorial output was limited mainly to low-budget westerns and action pictures, but it was as a second-unit director and action specialist that he was best known. He was famous for staging spectacular battle scenes in war films and action scenes in large-budget westerns, but he acquired the nickname "Breezy" for his "breezy" attitude towards safety while staging his sequences—during the famous cavalry charge at the end of Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), so many horses were killed or injured so severely that they had to be euthanized that both the public and Hollywood itself were outraged, resulting in the selection of the American Humane Society by the beleaguered studios to provide representatives on the sets of all films using animals to ensure their safety.

Marie Doro was an American stage and film actress of the early silent film era.

Max Philip Emmerich was an American track and field athlete and gymnast who competed in the 1904 Summer Olympics. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana.