List of Famous people who died in 1966

Lieutenant General Sir Iven Giffard Mackay, was a senior Australian Army officer who served in both world wars.

Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck, known professionally as Clifton Webb, was an American actor, dancer, and singer remembered for his roles in such films as Laura (1944), The Razor's Edge (1946), and Sitting Pretty (1948). Webb was Oscar-nominated for all three. He was known for his stage appearances in the plays of Noël Coward, including Blithe Spirit, as well as appearances on Broadway in a number of successful musical revues.

Natacha Rambova was an American film costume designer, set designer, and occasional actress who was active in Hollywood in the 1920s. In her later life, she abandoned design to pursue other interests, specifically Egyptology, a subject on which she became a published scholar in the 1950s.

Lazarus Leonard Aaronson, often referred to as L. Aaronson, was a British poet and a lecturer in economics. As a young man, he belonged to a group of Jewish friends who are today known as the Whitechapel Boys, many of whom later achieved fame as writers and artists. Though less radical in his use of language, he has been compared to his more renowned Whitechapel friend, Isaac Rosenberg, in terms of diction and verbal energy. Aaronson's poetry is characterised more as 'post-Georgian' than modernistic, and reviewers have since been able to trace influences back to both the English poet John Keats, and Hebrew poets such as Shaul Tchernichovsky and Zalman Shneur.

Samuel Jesse Battle was the first black police officer in New York City. After attending segregated schools in North Carolina, Battle moved north, first to Connecticut, then to New York City, where he took a job as a train porter and began studying for the New York City Police Department civil service exam. He was sworn in on March 6, 1911.

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, also commonly referred to as Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, was a South African politician, a scholar of applied psychology and sociology, and chief editor of "Die Transvaler" news paper. Verwoerd played an instrumental role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies as Minister of Native Affairs (1950–1958) and then as prime minister (1958–1966). Furthermore, Verwoerd played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership. He was the Union of South Africa's last prime minister, from 1958 to 1961, when he proclaimed the founding of the Republic of South Africa, remaining its prime minister until his assassination in 1966.

Samuel Alapai Kahanamoku was an American competition swimmer who represented the United States at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, where he won a bronze medal in the men's 100-meter freestyle event. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and was the younger brother of the surfer and Olympic gold medalist Duke Kahanamoku and elder brother of Sargent Kahanamoku.

Virginia Hill was an American organized crime figure. An Alabama native, Hill became a Chicago outfit courier during the mid-1930s. Hill was famous for being the girlfriend of mobster Bugsy Siegel.

Charles Arthur Bassett II, Major, USAF, was an American electrical engineer and United States Air Force test pilot. He went to Ohio State University for two years and later graduated from Texas Tech University. He joined the Air Force as a pilot and graduated from both the Aerospace Research Pilot School and the Air Force's Experimental Test Pilot School. Bassett was married and had two children. He was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1963 and was assigned to Gemini 9. He died in an airplane crash during training for his first spaceflight. He is memorialized on the Space Mirror Memorial; The Astronaut Monument; and the Fallen Astronaut memorial plaque, which was placed on the Moon during the Apollo 15 mission.

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year.