List of Famous people who died in 1972

Bobby Howes was a British entertainer who was a leading musical comedy performer in London's West End theatres in the 1930s and 1940s.

Carl Trumbull Hayden was an American politician and the first United States Senator to serve seven terms. Serving as Arizona's first Representative for eight terms before entering the Senate, Hayden set the record for longest-serving member of the United States Congress more than a decade before his retirement from politics. The longtime Dean of the United States Senate served as its president pro tempore and chairman of both its Rules and Administration and Appropriations committees. He was a member of the Democratic Party.

Eugène-Gabriel-Gervais-Laurent Tisserant was a French prelate and cardinal of the Catholic Church. Elevated to the cardinalate in 1936, Tisserant was a prominent and long-time member of the Roman Curia.

Henri Diamant-Berger was a French director, producer and screenwriter. In a career that lasted more than 50 years, he directed 48 films between 1913 and 1959, produced 17 between 1925 and 1967 and wrote 21 screenplays between 1916 and 1971.

Nubar Sarkis Gulbenkian was an Armenian-British business magnate and socialite born in the Ottoman empire. During World War II, he helped organize the underground network that would become known as the Pat O'Leary Line to repatriate British airman who became stranded in France.

Betty Smith was an American author. She is best known for her 1943 bestselling book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Katherine "Kitty" Vissering Oppenheimer was a German-American biologist, botanist, and a member of the Communist Party of America. She is best known as the wife of activist Joe Dallet, and then of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

Solomon Aaron Berson was an American physician and scientist whose discoveries, mostly together with Rosalyn Yalow, caused major advances in clinical biochemistry. Five years after Berson's death, Yalow received a Nobel Prize, which cannot be awarded posthumously, for their joint work on the radioimmunoassay. The Solomon A. Berson Medical Alumni Achievement Award was created in Berson's honor by NYU School of Medicine.