List of Famous people who died in 1961

Laurence Rochon "Laurie" Owen was a Hall of Fame American figure skater. She was the 1961 U.S. National Champion and represented the United States at the 1960 Winter Olympics, where she placed 6th. She was the daughter of Maribel Vinson and Guy Owen and the sister of Maribel Owen. Owen died, along with her mother, sister and the entire United States Figure Skating team, in the crash of Sabena Flight 548 en route to the 1961 World Figure Skating Championships.

Hasan Âli Yücel was a Turkish education reformer and philosophy teacher who served as minister of national education of Turkey from December 1938 to August 1946. He is remembered for the foundation of Village Institutes.

Michael Buchberger was a Roman Catholic priest, notable as the seventy-fourth bishop of Regensburg since the diocese's foundation in 739.

Harriet Shaw Weaver was an English political activist and a magazine editor. She was a significant patron of Irish writer James Joyce.

Isabel Paterson was a Canadian-American journalist, novelist, political philosopher, and a leading literary and cultural critic of her day. Historian Jim Powell has called Paterson one of the three founding mothers of American libertarianism, along with Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, who both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Paterson. Paterson's best-known work, The God of the Machine (1943), a treatise on political philosophy, economics, and history, reached conclusions and espoused beliefs that many libertarians credit as a foundation of their philosophy. Her biographer Stephen D. Cox (2004) believes Paterson was the "earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today." In a letter of 1943, Rand wrote that "The God of the Machine is a document that could literally save the world ... The God of the Machine does for capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and what the Bible did for Christianity."

Henry O'Neill was an American film actor known for playing gray-haired fathers, lawyers, and similarly dignified roles during the 1930s and 1940s.

Gerard Theodor Hubert van Innis was a Belgian competitor in the sport of archery, he competed in two Summer Olympics 20 years apart and came away with six gold medals and three silver medals.

Lucian Blaga was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright, poetry translator and novelist.

Pola Gauguin was a Danish-Norwegian painter, art critic and biographer.