List of Famous people who died in 1956

Yakub Kolas, real name Kanstantsin Mikhailovich Mitskievich was a Belarusian writer, People's Poet of the Byelorussian SSR (1926), member (1928) and vice-president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences.

Sir William Arthur Colegate was a British Conservative Party politician who served in the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1941 to 1945 and from 1950 to 1955.

John Russell was an American author and screenwriter.

John Wishart was a Scottish mathematician and agricultural statistician.

Katherine Agnew MacDonald was an American stage and film actress, film producer, and model. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was the older sister of actresses Miriam MacDonald and Mary MacLaren.

Charles Edward Merrill was an American philanthropist, stockbroker, and co-founder, with Edmund C. Lynch, of Merrill Lynch.

Arthur Lange was a United States bandleader and Tin Pan Alley composer of popular music. He composed music for over 120 films, including Grand Canary and Woman on the Run. Lange shared an Oscar nomination with Hugo Friedhofer for the film The Woman in the Window. He was nominated four times for Oscars, but did not win any.

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a lifelong collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre and the so-called V-effect.