List of Famous people who died in 2006

Sir Allen Fairhall KBE FRSA was an Australian politician who served in the House of Representatives from 1949 to 1969, representing the Liberal Party. He was a government minister under four prime ministers, most notably as Minister for Defence from 1966 to 1969.

John Jacob Weinzweig, was a Canadian composer of classical music.

Otto Lang was a skier and pioneer ski instructor from Yugoslavia, who lived and worked in the United States. After teaching skiing at a variety of smaller resorts in Austria, he joined the Hannes Schneider Ski School in St. Anton am Arlberg, one of the most prestigious ski schools of the era. Like many instructors who taught Schneider's Arlberg Method, Lang was eventually offered a chance to teach in the U.S., at Pecketts' on Sugar Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He later moved out west and found ski schools on Mount Rainier, Mount Baker and Mount Hood.

Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold was an English composer. His works feature music in many genres, including a cycle of nine symphonies, numerous concertos, concert works, chamber music, choral music and music for brass band and wind band. His style is tonal and rejoices in lively rhythms, brilliant orchestration, and an unabashed tunefulness. He wrote extensively for the theatre, with five ballets specially commissioned by the Royal Ballet, as well as two operas and a musical. He also produced scores for more than a hundred films, among these The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Oscar.

Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician.

Melvin Schwartz was an American physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.

Emilio Vedova was a modern Italian painter, considered one of the most important to emerge from his country's artistic scene, Arte Informale.