List of Famous people who died in 1971

Learie Nicholas Constantine, Baron Constantine, was a West Indian cricketer, lawyer and politician who served as Trinidad's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and became the UK's first black peer. He played 18 Test matches before the Second World War and took the West Indies' first wicket in Test cricket. An advocate against racial discrimination, in later life he was influential in the passing of the 1965 Race Relations Act in Britain. He was knighted in 1962 and made a life peer in 1969.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.

Amet-khan Sultan was a highly decorated Crimean Tatar flying ace with 30 personal and 19 shared kills who was twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Amet-khan was able to avoid deportation to Uzbekistan when the entire Crimean Tatar nation was repressed in 1944 due to his father's Lak ancestry, although he refused to change his passport nationality listing from Crimean Tatar to Lak throughout his entire life despite having personally witnessed the deportation of his nation while on vacation in Alupka. After the end of the war, he worked in Moscow as a test pilot and mastered piloting 96 different aircraft types before he was killed in a crash while testing a new engine on a modified Tupolev Tu-16 bomber. He remains memorialized throughout Ukraine and Russia, with streets, schools, and airports named after him as well as a museum dedicated to his memory.

Dolores Cacuango, also known as Mamá Doloreyuk, was a pioneer in the fight for indigenous and farmers rights in Ecuador. She stood out in the political arena and was one of the first activists of Ecuadorian feminism, between '30s and '60s. She founded the Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI) in 1944 with the help of Ecuador's Communist Party.

Chang Li-sheng was a Chinese politician and diplomat who served as the Secretary General of the Kuomintang from 1954 to 1959. L.S. Chang as he was commonly known, played a key role in Republic of China (ROC)’s political, economic, financial, and foreign affairs as well as in Kuomintang affairs from the 1920s until his death in Taiwan in 1971. Throughout his political life over four decades, Chang served in numerous important posts within both the KMT and the ROC’s local and central governments. He was a rare example of Chinese political virtues, noted for his integrity and honesty. He is remembered for numerous achievements and deeds, including his role in assisting Chen Cheng (1897-1965), former Taiwan provincial governor, Premier, and Vice President, to launch Taiwan’s local autonomy, economic and land reforms.

Edith Margaret Garrud was a British martial artist, suffragist and playwright. She was the first British female teacher of jujutsu and one of the first female martial arts instructors in the western world.

Paul Lukas was a Hungarian actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the first Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for his performance in the film Watch on the Rhine (1943), reprising the role he created on the Broadway stage.

Emmett Evan "Van" Heflin Jr. was an American theatre, radio and film actor. He played mostly character parts over the course of his film career, but during the 1940s had a string of roles as a leading man. Heflin won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Johnny Eager (1942). He also had memorable roles in Westerns such as Shane (1953), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and Gunman's Walk (1958).

Bernardo Alberto Houssay was an Argentine physiologist who, in 1947, was a co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating the amount of blood sugar (glucose) in animals. He was the first Argentine Nobel laureate in the sciences. He shared the prize with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty Cori, who won for their discoveries regarding the role of glucose in carbohydrate metabolism).

Marcel Nadjari was a Jewish-Greek survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Nadjari was a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau from May 1944 to November 1944. He is one of three members of the Sonderkommando that wrote his memoirs after the war, along with Filip Müller and Leon Cohen. He took part in the preparation of the Sonderkommando uprising. He authored one of the 19 manuscripts of Sonderkommando members found near the ruins of the Birkenau crematoria.