List of Famous people with last name Backus

James Gilmore Backus was an American actor. Among his most famous roles were Thurston Howell III on the 1960s sitcom Gilligan's Island, James Dean's character's father in Rebel Without a Cause, the voice of nearsighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo, the rich Hubert Updike III on the radio version of The Alan Young Show, and Joan Davis' character's husband on TV's I Married Joan. He also starred in his own show of one season, The Jim Backus Show, also known as Hot Off the Wire.

Donald Edgar "Gus" Backus was an American singer and actor. He started his career as a member of The Del-Vikings and later became a successful Schlager singer in Germany.

Christopher Paul Backus is an American actor, director and screenwriter.

John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?

Henny Backus was a Broadway showgirl in the 1930s whose stage credits include Orson Welles's Horse Eats Hat. She was the wife of actor and comedian Jim Backus.