List of Famous people who died in 1966

Walter Elias Disney was an American entrepreneur, animator, writer, voice actor and film producer. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. As a film producer, Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards earned by an individual, having won 22 Oscars from 59 nominations. He was presented with two Golden Globe Special Achievement Awards and an Emmy Award, among other honors. Several of his films are included in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Kenneth Henry Miles was a British sports car racing engineer and driver best known for his motorsport career in the US and with American teams on the international scene. He is an inductee to the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America.

Leonard Alfred Schneider, better known by his stage name Lenny Bruce, was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, and satirist. He was renowned for his open, freestyle and critical form of comedy which contained satire, politics, religion, sex, and vulgarity. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial was followed by a posthumous pardon, the first in the history of New York state, by Governor George Pataki in 2003.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was an Indian politician who served as the second Prime Minister of India. He promoted the White Revolution – a national campaign to increase the production and supply of milk – by supporting the Amul milk co-operative of Anand, Gujarat and creating the National Dairy Development Board. Underlining the need to boost India's food production, Shastri also promoted the Green Revolution in India in 1965. This led to an increase in food grain production, especially in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, commonly known as Swatantryaveer Savarkar or simply Veer Savarkar in Marathi language, was an Indian independence activist and politician who formulated the Hindu nationalist philosophy of Hindutva. He was a leading figure in the Hindu Mahasabha.

Charles Joseph Whitman was an American mass murderer who became infamous as the "Texas Tower Sniper". On August 1, 1966, he used knives to kill his mother and his wife in their respective homes, then went to the University of Texas in Austin with multiple firearms and began indiscriminately shooting at people. He fatally shot three people inside the university tower. He then went to the tower's 28th-floor observation deck, where he fired at random people for some 96 minutes, killing an additional 11 people and wounding 31 others, including a woman whose injuries prevented her pregnancy from coming to term, before he was shot dead by Austin police officers. Whitman killed a total of 16 people; the 16th victim died 35 years later from injuries sustained in the attack.

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to theorize that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by an expanding universe, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He first derived "Hubble's law", now called the Hubble–Lemaître law by the IAU, and published the first estimation of the Hubble constant in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed the "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe, calling it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", and later calling it "the beginning of the world".

Elizabeth Christ Trump was a German businesswoman and is considered the matriarch of the Trump family. She married Frederick Trump in 1902. While raising their three children, the early death of her husband in 1918 required the 37-year-old widow to manage their properties. She founded the real estate development company E. Trump & Son with her son Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump.

Edward Montgomery Clift was an American actor. A four-time Academy Award nominee, The New York Times said he was known for his portrayal of "moody, sensitive young men".