List of Famous people who died in 1961

Paul Richter was an Austrian film actor. He owed his great popularity in German films of the silent era largely to the directors Joe May and Fritz Lang.

Yrjö Kaarlo Leino was a Finnish communist politician. Imprisoned twice for his communist activities, and spending much of the Second World War as an underground communist activist, he served as a minister in three cabinets between 1944 and 1948.

Leonhard Frank was a German expressionist writer. He studied painting and graphic art in Munich, and gained acclaim with his first novel The Robber Band. When a Berlin journalist celebrated in a famous café about news of the loss of the ship RMS Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine, Frank was upset – and slapped the man in his face. That is why he went into exile in Switzerland (1915–18), where he wrote a series of pacifist short-stories published under the title Man is Good. He returned to Germany, but after the Nazis gained power in 1933 Frank had to emigrate a second time. He lived in Switzerland again, moved to London, then Paris and finally fled under adventurous conditions to the United States in 1940, returning to Munich in 1950. His best-known novels were In the Last Coach and Carl and Anna, which he dramatized in 1929. In 1947 MGM made a movie titled Desire Me out of this story.

Otto Loewi was a German-born pharmacologist and psychobiologist who discovered the role of acetylcholine as an endogenous neurotransmitter. For his discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936, which he shared with Sir Henry Dale, who was a lifelong friend that helped to inspire the neurotransmitter experiment. Loewi met Dale in 1902 when spending some months in Ernest Starling's laboratory at University College, London.

Carl Hermann was a German professor of crystallography. With Charles-Victor Mauguin, he invented an international standard notation for crystallographic groups known as the Hermann–Mauguin notation or International notation.

Thomas James Howard Jr. was an American photographer who worked at the Washington bureau of P. & A. Photographs during the 1920s. His photograph of the execution of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, on January 12, 1928 has been called "the most famous tabloid photo of the decade".